Story-driven action game Blood Message is a cinematic showstopper, and after 20 minutes hands-on, it plays great too

By the end of my hands-on time with Blood Message, I feel like I've seen a magic trick. Tucked into a humid little booth at the edge of Summer Game Fest was a game that felt, at times, like the fulfillment of the dream that games like Uncharted were setting us up for decades ago: an intensely cinematic experience that makes combat look like a choreographed action scene while still giving you enough gameplay meat to keep the "playing" part engaging.

Blood Message is set in 9th century China, and I start my demo taking control of a gruff man trying to help his brother escape a city being ravaged by soldiers of the Tubo empire. I don't get a great sense of the politics at play here – I've only learned that Tubo is the ancient name for Tibet now that I've gone down a post-show Wikipedia rabbithole – but the stakes are quickly established in a handful of violent encounters with those soldiers.

Familiar foundations

If you've played any cinematic, linear, narrative-driven game released in the past decade, you already know how Blood Message plays. You'll squeeze sideways through a tight space. You'll mash a button to lift a heavy object out of the way. You will press a button near a tall wall to boost an NPC companion over the ledge. You'll engage in stealth by crouching in waist-high grass while waiting for enemies to pass by. You'll even, occasionally, be able to walk into a room off the main path and find a collectible there offering a bit of backstory.

But what's impressive about Blood Message is how seamless and polished the whole thing is, best demonstrated by its combat. I strike at enemies with a short sword and parry their attacks with a generous defensive window, but unexpectedly, my attack will sometimes drive a foe careening into one of his comrades and knock both of them off balance. If I parry while I'm on the ground, my character might grab a nearby pot to bash his attacker's head. If I knock back one of the soldiers near a water trough, a deadly struggle will ensue as I try to push him underwater.

Remarkably, even with all these cinematic flourishes, the fights still feel responsive and engaging. I have real control over how they play out, even among the many varied ways the environment can influence the battle. My roughly 20-minute demo felt like the kind of impossibly perfect demo you'd once see on an E3 stage – games you'd discover, once the game launched, were largely fakes. But while this was definitely a vertical slice, I played it, and it's very much real.

Top-tier choreography

The demo's largest combat encounter transitions seamlessly into a brief quick-time event and cutscene when, with two enemies left, one of them parries my attack and the other rushes up to grab me from behind. Certainly, transitions straight between gameplay and cutscenes are nothing new, but I'm impressed by how well it's integrated within a larger, more dynamic fight.

The ultimate quality of Blood Message is going to depend on how well its story lands, and I couldn't get a great sense of that, since the demo picks up right in the middle of the action and doesn't offer much context. But the characters are well-acted, and I'm intrigued by the ancient Chinese setting – a rarity in video games outside of the bombast of something like Dynasty Warriors.

Blood Message will clearly have some bombast of its own, judging by the massive battles showcased in the Summer Game Fest trailer, but the scale is human and grounded. I do go crashing through some walls and take out a fair few soldiers single-handedly, but my character feels more vulnerable than a rubber-boned Nathan Drake mowing down entire armies.

I don't know how well Blood Message will be able to maintain its impressive attention to detail and low-key but thrilling set pieces for the length of an entire game, but if you – like me – have a soft-spot for cinematic action games, this is absolutely one to watch. It's rare to see a game so convincingly convey the vibes of a film epic while also remaining fun to play, and Blood Message does it with style and confidence.