Look at that lump of frozen granite he calls a head, that shrapnel-burst of witchy white hair from sideburn to top-knot. You'll usually see the faces of the people you're slaughtering, for one thing - close enough to watch their mouths stretch wide as blade slithers under collarbone - and it's obvious from the outset that Sekiro himself is no angel.

Availability: Out now on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

It embraces the fact that you are a malevolent presence, if not beyond redemption, and, like its spiritual forebears, Dark Souls and Bloodborne, plays this out at every level of what is probably the year's finest game.

Set in Sengoku period Japan, a realm of blood and fire where no field is without its crop of dropped swords, Shadows Die Twice admits no such disunity of theme.

Consider The Division, a game about massacring the dispossessed for guns and T-shirts which hails you throughout as a hero, decorously concealing the faces of your victims beneath gasmasks and goggles. Hearing that, I couldn't help but reflect on how many games are strangers to their own cruelty, wilfully blind to it - exhorting you to kill and pillage while insistently styling you a do-gooder. 'I see you're no stranger to cruelty,' observes a character later on in From Software's predictably astonishing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Heart-stopping swordfights and deft, panoramic stealth waged across another vast, gorgeously rancid From Software landscape.

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