'Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice' Will Have Areas Similar to Blighttown from 'Dark Souls'

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice takes influence from the Dark Souls series while still standing apart as a unique adventure, but it will include some challenging environmental zones akin to the Blighttown area from Dark Souls.

Game Informer spoke to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice game director Hidetaka Miyazaki who also serves as the president of FromSoftware and asked if there were any difficult environments players would have to traverse in the new game. Sekiro is full of mechanics and other features that will be recognizable to those familiar with the Dark Souls series, and according to Miyazaki, players will once again experience the dread that they felt when traveling through Blighttown.

The question asked inquired as to whether there would be a zone filled with poison and giants, one that was an all around "terrible zone to go through" with Blighttown used as an example. Miyazaki confirmed that there would be, but it won't be quite as restrictive as Blighttown was when it comes to trudging through the zone.

"So, the simple answer is yes," Miyazaki told Game Informer. "We do have areas where the environment plays as the enemy to the player. However, one of the core concepts of Sekiro was to create this greater freedom of movement and freedom of traversal, and so we don't want to squash that by creating these really restrictive game spaces. So yeah, you will find somewhere like that – similar to that – that is a pinpoint location in the game, but we don't try to restrict the user in ways previous ones do."

For those who didn't play Dark Souls or preferred to bypass Blighttown with the Master Key starting item, the area was and is considered one of the most oppressive and frustrating environments in the game. It houses a huge lake of poison which players will have to trudge through, giants which assault players uninhibited by the environment, and dart-shooting enemies which fire toxic projectiles at players that'll lead to a quick death. Couple that with a plentiful amount of ledges that players can fall from and a dimly-lit environment that's hard to see in – though that was improved in Dark Souls Remastered – and it's no wonder that players would take the Master Key to avoid it.

Whether there will actually be lakes of poison in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or if it'll just have it's own "Blighttown" level is unknown, but players will find out when the game launches for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on March 22nd.