Difficulty: Gamechanger (Normal). Time played: 1:07:04. Death count: 13. Those were the numbers I tallied at the end of my hands-on session playing Phantom Blade 0 at gamescom 2025 in Cologne, Germany. 

The demo at gamescom 2025 gives you a pretty extensive impression of how the game’s combat looks and feels. Which is great because it looks like Phantom Blade 0 is placing most of its bets on its prowess as a hack and slasher. 

Controls 

If you have any experience at all with action games, this should be relatively easy to pick-up. We played on the PlayStation 5 Pro so these are the controls I’ll reference. 

Square and Triangle are your primary and secondary attack buttons. Cross or X is, per usual, the jump button, and Circle lets you dodge. Pressing Circle and then using L3 will let you determine the direction of your dodge. 

Holding L1 lets you block while pressing it at the right moment lets you parry attacks. L2 becomes available once you’ve filled up the gauge of your main weapon. L2 unleashes your special attack. 

R1 lets you interact with your environment. I mostly remember using it to scale and run along walls . R2, meanwhile, triggers the use of your equipped secondary weapon. 

You essentially carry four weapons in combat. There are two slots each for your main and secondary weapons. You can switch them out any time during combat using the left directional button for the main weapon and the right directional button for the secondary weapon. 

The down directional button lets you consume items. For this demo, it was used for healing. 

Combat

What carried this whole experience is how polished and engaging the combat felt. Not once will you feel like you don’t have the tools to win despite facing off with multiple enemies at certain points in the demo. 

There are certain combinations of Square and Triangle for specific combos. But I’m gonna be honest with you, during the first 15 minutes, I was mostly button mashing and was still getting stylish results. 

After beating down enemies, a Triangle button appears that lets you execute finishers. These look absolutely striking and differ depending on the weapon you have equipped. And while it can be interrupted to start, once you’re in the middle of it, you’re practically invincible. 

If you deal enough damage to multiple enemies, you can chain these finishers from one enemy to another for an even higher level of badassery finishes. 

Boss encounters

It wasn’t until the first boss encounter that I actually locked in and became more mindful of when I block, dodge, and parry. Most of my 13 death counts also happened here. 

It wasn’t particularly difficult to read the boss’s patterns. My elder millennial reflexes just couldn’t keep up. It took plenty of tries, but with the encouragement of my play guide, Luke (shoutout to Luke, he was great company during the playthrough), I finally bested the first boss encounter of the demo. 

It took a few tries of learning his patterns and properly timing my blocks, dodges, and parries, along with changing up my loadout to best deal with the boss battle. 

So, while you can get away with button mashing through the fodder throughout the game, the boss battles will test both your reflexes and strategically figuring out your windows to attack. 

After that there were a couple more mini-boss encounters, which I surprisingly dealt with in one go, before the final boss of the demo – the Seven Judgments. It’s the boss battle featured in the Year of the Snake trailer that looked absolutely difficult to deal with. 

At this point though, I was already locked in and only died once. Still, it was a challenging, engaging, and extremely fun boss encounter. 

Watch it play out here: 

Release date and more game details

I tried pressing but as of now, the folks over at S-Game still aren’t ready to disclose any potential release window for the game. We’re just gonna have to wait. 

The demo itself showed the potential for some of your usual exploration and mini-puzzle solving. But bear in mind that this is mostly a linear hack and slash game most similar to the likes of Ninja Gaiden. 

Hack and slash at its finest 

I know it was only an hour of gameplay, but it was more than enough to get me looking forward to seeing more of what Phantom Blade 0 has to offer. I’m 100% certain more depth will be added to the combat and it will be an overall fun and flow-state-inducing experience once it fully releases.