10 Video Games Only The Most Skilled Players Can Handle

7. Nioh

Carrying on from where Dark Souls and Bloodborne left off, Team Ninja's Nioh was actually in development for a decade, yet emerged as a spiritual successor to everything FromSoftware pioneered.

Where once we had belaboured movements and a focus on positioning as you approached each encounter like a chess match, now a faster game engine means you can leap into a number of frays in quick succession, swapping stances, using items, drinking the game in at a far steadier pace than anything that came before.

Team Ninja knew that speeding up Souls-like combat could make gameplay excruciatingly hard if they got it wrong, and it took two separate public alpha and beta demos to refine everything just right. These earlier looks into Nioh were only surmountable by gaming's most diehard masochists, feeding into a final product whose difficulty is as razor-sharp as its visuals are gorgeous to take in.