Phantom Blade Zero

Combat is the centre of everything. Soul strings attacks into seamless combos, and every exchange is a choice between dodging, deflecting or countering. Deflect at the right moment and the enemy's swing turns into a showering spark and an opening; mistime it and a single heavy hit can end the fight. S-GAME's pitch is that the combos are easy to learn but the timing goes deep, and the difficulty is adjustable for players who want the story without the punishment.

Your kit grows in two layers. More than 30 primary weapons cover swords, blades and heavier tools, each with its own rhythm. On top of those sit Phantom Edges, over 20 secondary arts you take from the bosses and elite fighters you beat. Pairing a fast primary with a crowd-clearing Phantom Edge, or a heavy weapon with a quick gap-closer, is where builds start to feel personal.

Between fights you explore the Phantom World, a connected world of ruined compounds, hidden passages and mechanisms that reward poking into corners. Side paths lead to new characters and secrets such as Memory Flowers and Inanis' Dreamscape, and the paths you take shape which ending you reach. It is a single-player game with full controller support, and S-GAME recommends playing on a gamepad.

The Wulin, the martial world of wuxia fiction, is tangled in a conspiracy that threatens all of it. Soul is a warrior framed for the murder of his own master, and the attack that follows leaves him with a devastating wound to the heart. He survives, but only just: he has sixty-six days left to live.

Alone and hunted, Soul sets out to find out who set him up and why, and every answer opens another secret about the Wulin and the Discordance tearing at it. The setting mixes traditional Chinese architecture and costume with mechanical prosthetics, crumbling industrial ruins and a modern rock soundtrack, so the story plays like a golden-age wuxia film shot in a steampunk wasteland. Kindness and vengeance pull Soul in different directions, and the countdown hangs over every choice he makes.

Phantom Blade Zero is out now on Windows PC through Steam at US$59.99. Steam lists local prices of RM189 in Malaysia, S$69.90 in Singapore, ₱2,799 in the Philippines, ฿1,490 in Thailand and Rp 799,000 in Indonesia. It supports 15 interface languages, including Thai and Vietnamese. The PC build needs a fast machine: minimum spec is a GTX 1660 or RX 5500 XT with 16 GB of RAM, 145 GB of storage on an SSD, targeting 1080p at 30 fps with upscaling. Full controller support covers DualShock and DualSense pads.