Through dark magic, one dev looks to have captured the magic of Sekiro in a gorgeous 2D game – I've followed it for a year, it finally has a Steam page, and I hammered the Wishlist button into dust

Pixel art of warrior princess in snowy forest.

I follow entirely too many game developers and dev communities on social media, and the main reason for that is that I keep discovering games like False Princess Iruruu. Developer Pocchi Studio has been posting about the game for a while, and after following the GIFs and design musings since last year, I pounced on its Steam page.

False Princess Iruruu is billed as "an action-packed, story-rich adventure game with a rhythmic, Sekiro-like combat system." Now, if you were to harvest some of my few remaining brain cells and use them to culture a game in a big petri dish, you would probably get something that sounds a lot like this. Parries, a stagger system tied to balance meters, loads of gizmos like a grappling hook attack – it's me all the way down.