By the end of my hands-on time with Blood Message, I feel like I've seen a magic trick. Tucked into a humid little booth at the edge of Summer Game Fest was a game that felt, at times, like the fulfillment of the dream that games like Uncharted were setting us up for decades ago: an intensely cinematic experience that makes combat look like a choreographed action scene while still giving you enough gameplay meat to keep the "playing" part engaging.
Blood Message is set in 9th century China, and I start my demo taking control of a gruff man trying to help his brother escape a city being ravaged by soldiers of the Tubo empire. I don't get a great sense of the politics at play here – I've only learned that Tubo is the ancient name for Tibet now that I've gone down a post-show Wikipedia rabbithole – but the stakes are quickly established in a handful of violent encounters with those soldiers.
