After the blockbuster success of Black Myth: Wukong and with the enticing Phantom Blade Zero waiting to strike on the horizon, it’s clear that Chinese-developed action-RPGs are having a bit of a moment. The latest contender to step into the spotlight with its sword unsheathed is Sword Sage: Awakening, and at a recent BiliBili Game First Look event in Shanghai I got to go hands-on with this sorta-Soulslike from Chinese indie studio Sword Panda. I came away largely impressed by Sword Sage: Awakening’s unique, Bruce Lee-inspired combat system, even if it did force me to quickly unlearn everything I thought I knew about the fighting fundamentals of the genre.
Full disclosure, I am not a Soulslike expert. Yes I’ve dabbled here and there in the likes of Sekiro and Lies of P, and yes like millions of others I’ve beaten both Elden Ring and its story expansion because I felt emboldened by the freedom its open world provided in terms of picking from battles in all directions rather than repeatedly butting my head up against regular walls that block my progression. At any rate, I feel as though I’ve played enough of this style of action-RPG to know that you often spend just as much time dodge-rolling out of harm’s way as you do actually dealing damage to each enemy.
Sword Sage does things differently. There is no button to dodge-roll, as much as my thumb instinctively tried to find it during the opening encounters of my two-hour hands-on. In fact, there’s no button to parry enemy attacks either. Instead, the developers have taken inspiration from the martial art developed by Bruce Lee, Jeet Kune Do, which literally translates to “way of the intercepting fist”. Basically, the philosophy behind it is that the most ideal time to hit an opponent is when they’re initiating an attack against you.
Although its battles are fought with blades instead of bare knuckles, success in Sword Sage very much relies on this core combat principle. In the split-second before an enemy strikes, you need to read their posture and match it with your evading counter by holding the block button and thrusting the right thumbstick in the appropriate direction: up if they’re swinging high, down if they’re swinging low, and to the left or right if they’re aiming at your mid-section. Nail the timing and direction, and you’ll trigger a counter-attack to open up the enemy’s stance and allow you to unleash a rapid combo or special attack unique to the sword you’re wielding.
Alternatively you can just block attacks with your blade as well, unless they’re of the unblockable variety from one of Sword Sage’s more imposing foes, but shielding yourself with your sword chips away at its durability. Allow it to shatter and it needs to be reforged in the weapon chest slung around the shoulders of Sword Sage’s heroine, forcing you to switch to her second blade while your primary weapon regenerates over a period of time. Thus mastering Sword Sage’s evade and counter system is key. In the words of the developers, you must evade the steel and return for scarlet, as in the freshly drawn blood of your opponent.
That’s not to say that all of Sword Sage felt foreign to me. Fans of FromSoftware games will feel right at home with its structure, with levels that twist and turn and loop back around on themselves, allowing you to unblock doors and drop ladders to create shortcuts to skip regenerated enemy groups or return to previous save points. In this instance, the ‘campfires’ of Sword Sage are benches carved from a tree stump and manned by an adorable red panda who serves you tea to rejuvenate your health bar and also helps you craft various consumables for temporary combat buffs and the like.
There are also countless areas where you’ll be lured into attempting a sneak attack on an enemy guard with his back turned, only to be ambushed by a lunging strike from an unseen foe lurking in your blindspot, which is a signature move straight from the FromSoftware book of Playing Pranks on Players. Similarly, on other occasions I took a wrong turn and came face to face with an entirely optional badarse standing eerily still, exuding that intimidating sense of calm that lets you know he’s going to put up one heck of a fight and you should probably just walk on by.
There were plenty of nice surprises too, like treasure chests that remain sealed shut until I’d puzzled my way to finding a series of glyphs in the environment to unlock them. At other times I was amused to discover rival enemy factions at war with one another; sometimes I’d sit back and watch or calmly sneak past, while other times I’d step in for a few cheap kills in order to snag myself some vital crafting resources. These incidental encounters made Sword Sage’s world feel alive, and not like it was just full of enemies who had nothing better to do than sit on their hands until I arrived.
Still, it’s Sword Sage’s combat that intrigues me the most. I’ll admit that it took me quite a large chunk of my hands-on time to properly get to grips with the evade and counter system, and even then I still struggled with it from time to time especially once I reached boss encounters that demand mastery of the style due to their unblockable blows. These critical strikes do give you an additional onscreen clue to indicate their incoming direction, but since these prompts are Chinese symbols it took me a while to properly learn how to interpret them. (The developers later told me that the option to change them to basic arrows will be a feature in Sword Sage’s final release.)
In the moments that I really got into a flow with it, though, it felt absolutely exhilarating. By the time I’d reached Sword Sage’s first properly challenging boss fight I felt far more comfortable anticipating the lumbering demon’s heavy blows and gradually chipping away at its lengthy health bar. I still died at the beginning of its second phase, mind you, but hey – at least it felt as though I was making progress.
That said, while Sword Sage: Awakening is undeniably challenging in a Soulslike sort of way, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Developer Sword Panda hasn’t taken an unwavering “get good or get lost” approach to its game design like FromSoftware is famous for, instead it’s included some optional training wheels should you find that your swordplay isn’t quite cutting it.
To be clear, there is only one difficulty setting in Sword Sage: Awakening. However, once you’ve died three times in the story – whether that’s several hours deep into the adventure or as early as its opening minutes – you get two special talismans added to your kit bag. One allows you to evade and counter no matter which direction you push the stick, while the other makes life even easier since it grants you the ability to automatically counter simply by holding the block button. It’s worth noting that these buffs aren’t permanent, you can swap them out of your loadout at any time like every other talisman in the campaign, so if you feel like you’re ready to retry Sword Sage’s combat as it’s intended deeper into the adventure you’re welcome to disable them later on.
With the clock ticking on my hands-on time, I have no shame in admitting that I equipped the auto-evade talisman in order to topple the demo’s intensely challenging final boss. To my surprise it was still pretty enjoyable, largely due to the impressive Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style fight choreography that made each combat exchange really pop off the screen. Whether my sense of pride would prohibit me from using these assists in the finished game I can’t say, but I’m all for accessibility and I appreciate that Sword Panda has gone to these lengths to make Sword Sage’s challenging swordplay approachable to a broader set of players.
There’s still much to learn about Sword Sage: Awakening. I’m told that its finished campaign will be around 15 hours long, and there’s all kinds of weapon modifications and magical powers to tailor your playstyle with that I wasn’t really able to dig into during my hands-on. It doesn’t have a release window either, but given that the team behind it told me that development was only about 60% complete – and that certainly showed in the PC version’s occasionally rough performance – I wouldn’t anticipate it arriving until sometime next year. Based off my time with it so far, though, when Sword Sage: Awakening does eventually arrive it will be one action-RPG that I certainly won’t be side-stepping.
Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN’s Sydney office. He attended BiliBili Game First Look as a guest of the event organisers.
