Three Kingdoms-era China, yes, but also Lordran, The Lands Between, and, most resonantly, the kingdom of Ashina: Wo Long wears its influences brazenly. Rest at a checkpoint and your healthreplenishing flask will refill while the local foes respawn. Drop a weapon or a cleansing item in front of a friendly resident animal (in this case a panda cub, rather than an old crow) and he’ll swap your offering for something else. Even the interloping assassins who rupture time and space to appear in your world, then murderously sprint toward you, glow with a particular red aura that’s not so much Souls-like as it is Souls-precise.

At first touch it seems this is a game that can be played in the classic, PlayStation 2-era Koei Tecmo style: your character pirouetting, quickened by a flurry of button mashing, slicing through waves of the popcorn enemies that patrol its burning villages and shadow-haunted valleys. Then you meet Zhang Liang, boss of the prelude (a familiar face to players of last year’s demo) for the final reckoning in a grass circle typical of martial arts cinema.

A bruiser by nature, Liang runs and twirls before leaping high into the air, to bring his great club down on your head. Most of his attacks can be blocked, but when the chest of any one of Wo Long’s enemies glows red, only a precision-timed parry (a ‘deflect’, in this game’s terminology) will prevent your character from taking terrible damage. A parry will lower your foe’s defences and eventually leave them open to a health-gaugesplicing special. Standard attacks do such insignificant damage that in Wo Long learning to parry is not an optional addon for the competent player, but essential.