BODY: The soulslike genre has no shortage of pretenders, but every so often one shows up with a system worth remembering. At the PlayStation booth at ChinaJoy 2026 in Shanghai, that game was Daba: Land of Water Scar — the latest from Chinese studio DarkStar, best known for the punishing 2018 boss-rush title Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption.
What separates Daba from the pack is its insistence on the physical. Combat here feels weighted and deliberate, with a grounded realism that resists the floaty theatrics common to the genre. Every swing carries momentum, and positioning matters as much as timing.
The headline mechanic is the interplay of two weapons and two distinct parry systems. Rather than locking you into a single fighting style, Daba asks you to read each encounter and switch between armaments on the fly, with each weapon tied to its own defensive rhythm. Learning when to swap — and which parry to commit to — is where the tension lives. Get it right and combat sings; hesitate and you pay for it.
Our hands-on session had that signature soulslike bite: the kind of white-knuckle exchange where a single misread parry ends a run. DarkStar clearly understands the assignment, layering a fresh systemic wrinkle onto a foundation of hard-won fundamentals.
The insider take
From Tokyo, it's striking how confidently Chinese studios now stride into a genre that FromSoftware defined a stone's throw away in Japan. Sinner was a scrappy proof-of-concept; Daba reads as the mature follow-through, and its ChinaJoy debut at the PlayStation booth signals Sony's continued courtship of mainland developers. For Japanese players who treat the soulslike as a homegrown institution, watching the genre evolve on the other side of the East China Sea is equal parts flattering and quietly competitive.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).