I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical when I first watched Phantom Blade 0’s initial launch trailer during Sony’s State of Play 2023. The extremely fluid animations in the combat shown made it looks like edited scripted events, more than actual gameplay. Then when the next trailer came out in 2024 with full gameplay where we could see the actual UI and button prompts I realized that, while it isn’t quite as choreographed as the initial trailer showed, Phantom Blade 0 still looks like a sick action game. Well, I just got an hour hands-on demo with it at Summer Game Fest and yeah, it is pretty damn great.

To be upfront, I am a bit limited on what I can describe and talk about from the demo, which kills me because I have a habit of describing things in detail. But I can still provide my general thoughts about what I played, but excuse me if I’m a bit vague here. 

You shut your… face?

As I mentioned above, I was at first concerned about the initial reveal and how the game would actually play compared to the extremely fluid animations and choreographed moves they were showing. I’m going to be frank here, what I played did not look or feel as smooth and consistent as that original 2023 reveal. However, I quickly did not care once I started diving into the game. Is it as smooth as that reveal? No. But does it have some extremely fantastic animations and slick take down kills? Hell yes.

First thing to mention is that Phantom Blade 0 is NOT a Souls-like, enemies will not reappear when you rest at a checkpoint. Nor will you lose progression upgrade material upon death. This is more akin to your traditional Action RPG with a bit of souls world design, that’s about it. I was given a wide variety of weapons to try out during the demo, and they all had their perks and drawbacks depending on who I was fighting. However, the core gameplay of blocking, dodging, and parrying felt more like Sekiro than traditional Souls. I’m not mad at that one bit.

Hmmm that Coppermaul may come in handy…

Beating a boss unlocks a new weapon that you will need to progress further, as well as explore previous parts of the map for additional upgrade materials. This made me very happy to see that there would be more reason to go back through areas again afterwards sort of like a metroidvania. As far as difficulty goes, I died one time during the demo, and it wasn’t even on one of the two bosses I fought. I got caught on a damned group of enemies with a healer, and I missed my dodges! I know they tone down difficulty for these demos and they gave us all the weapons to start with, but I expect the actual game to have more difficulty and gradual increases in abilities and weapons.

Visually, Phantom Blade 0 has a lot of style and some fantastic enemy design. As I mentioned before I’m kind of frustrated I can’t talk in detail of the awesome enemies I fought, but to keep it vague, they have some really great designs and I loved how they did the “healer” enemies. There were plenty of enemy archetypes from typical fodder, to fast moving, to long range enemies with explosives. You will need to stay on your toes and be careful of all sorts enemies, even from distance. Unfortunately, there isn’t a free aim with the bow so if you can’t lock on, don’t bother.

Well, excuuuuse me, princess!

I’m not sure if this is breaking the rules, but I was playing on a PS5 Pro and it looked great. One thing the developer told me that I thought was awesome was that the map is completely hand painted in a traditional Chinese style before it’s even transferred into the game. This is to make sure the map design felt authentic before they started designing the level and markers around it.

Sound design was also incredible, from the clashing of the weapons to the slashing of flesh, it all sounded fantastic. Each weapon had its own sound effects that properly portray the weight and impact of it. Plus, the soundtrack had a fantastic blend of electric guitar to get the blood flowing mixed with the traditional Chinese flute and bowed instruments.

There are some really cool weapons to take enemies down with.

While I’d love to go into so much more detail about my time with Phantom Blade 0, I hope what I could describe was enough to paint a picture of how I felt about the game. This was one of the best action games I got to play at Summer Game Fest and I can’t wait to play more!

Phantom Blade 0 is set to launch on October 29th, 2026 for PC and PlayStation 5.
*All pictures are provided by the publisher based on the one hour demo I played.