The Nioh series deserves credit for bringing a consistent, distinct variant to Soulslike action RPGs, and for meaningfully improving over time. Nioh was fine, albeit clunky. Nioh 2 was quite good, and if you wanted to, you could happily lose hundreds of hours to it. Nioh 3, based on the five hours I've played of the demo – which is really just the first part of the game, minus a few features – could be one of the best Soulslikes ever made. For my money, the king of the genre outside FromSoftware headquarters is still Lies of P, and I can now seriously imagine Nioh 3 sitting right alongside it.
When I downloaded the Nioh 3 demo on Steam ahead of the game's full release on February 5 (on PS5 and PC, and perhaps Xbox once exclusivity drops), I figured I'd stick to my usual Steam demo plan: put in 20 or 30 minutes just to get a feel for things, then if I like what I see, save my appetite for the main game. Fortunately, progress in the Nioh 3 demo carries into that main game, so you're free to go hog-wild without needing to replay content later. But this is only one of many reasons that the Nioh 3 demo ate five hours of my life in one sitting. I still have a lot to learn and see, but across the board, this looks and feels like the best version of Nioh.
