Onimusha: Way of the Sword asks you to pay attention to the world around you as much as the weird things that come crawling out of the ground and take swipes and bites at new protagonist Miyamoto Musashi. After spending three hours hands-on with the game on PS5 Pro, what stays with me is how confidently Capcom is rebuilding the series around atmosphere, movement and building its supernatural Japan as much as welcoming back the swordplay and the Oni Gauntlet.
Creating a believable world is core to making Onimusha’s return feel unique (read my impressions of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny Remaster for more in this retro series). It’s in the way a ruined village feels frozen in the aftermath of something terrible, its population frozen into stony, tortured statues growing like coral. How a demon-infested street in Kyoto can still feel lived in even as people run in fear from a gaggle of zombie samurai. How a boss design can be genuinely unsettling and somehow ridiculous at the same time, muttering “I hate being hungry” as they try to eat souls.
