I’ve had a chance to play the Stellar Blade now, and I had quite a bit of fun with it.

Now, it’s definitely not the Bayonetta-like I expected when I first saw footage. Combat is much slower, despite still having some stylish elements.

You have light and heavy attacks you can string together into combos, as well as some special attacks. You can also parry enemy attacks if you block with perfect timing, and that’s very important.

Parrying attacks not only protects you, but enough parries will break an enemy’s stance and let you use a powerful “Retribution” attack.

The game is forgiving enough that you won’t be dying all the time, but it still taught me that I’ll need to get better at parrying. Regular enemies were fine, but the bosses really needed me to know what I was doing.

Technically you can also dodge attacks, but the window felt much narrower to me. There are also skills you can learn to improve some of these elements, though.

The demo covers the start of the game, and I can’t tell how the story will be yet. I’m intrigued enough by the world, though. It seems like it will have light exploration, with items and lore documents found when I looked around, and you can fast-travel between major locations.

Oh, and you can swim. It’s such a minor thing, but it took me by surprise. When I first saw water, I expected to either be blocked or damaged, so I was impressed when I could not only swim, but even dive and swim underwater to find an item there.

After the story portion of the demo, you unlock a later boss fight with more skills available to you. You also have a handful of costumes for that section. Costumes are just for aesthetics, and I love that. Too few games have unlockable costumes.

In short, I had a lot of fun with the Stellar Blade demo, and I’m looking forward to the full game.