Through dark magic, one dev looks to have captured the magic of Sekiro in a gorgeous 2D game – I've followed it for a year, it finally has a Steam page, and I hammered the Wishlist button into dust

Pixel art of warrior princess in snowy forest.

I follow entirely too many game developers and dev communities on social media, and the main reason for that is that I keep discovering games like False Princess Iruruu. Developer Pocchi Studio has been posting about the game for a while, and after following the GIFs and design musings since last year, I pounced on its Steam page.

False Princess Iruruu is billed as "an action-packed, story-rich adventure game with a rhythmic, Sekiro-like combat system." Now, if you were to harvest some of my few remaining brain cells and use them to culture a game in a big petri dish, you would probably get something that sounds a lot like this. Parries, a stagger system tied to balance meters, loads of gizmos like a grappling hook attack – it's me all the way down.

But what's really set the hook is the art and experimentation on display here. This Sekiro-like takes place in China and stars a young warrior girl from the country's western steppes "as she embarks on a dangerous journey to fulfill a summons from the royal Qing court," per that Steam page. Royal infighting sees her besieged by assassins in forests and wintry landscapes, all rendered in lovely pixel art that manages a lot of detail despite its low pixel count.

The art is lush, and the ideas orbiting the game are immensely fascinating. I don't know how much of this will make it into the final version, but just recently the developer has posted about:

• Grab attacks that you can counter by kicking
• A score counter that doubles down on the 'Sekiro is a rhythm game' argument
• Shockwave attacks that can't be blocked, but can be surfed mid-air with a well-time jump
• A grapple attack that sacrifices a bandage you could use to heal in order to yank enemies instead, with a curious 'grapple then heal' system that doesn't let you heal and then grapple with the same bandage

Loads of games pre- and post-Sekiro have integrated intense parrying into 2D action systems, but from what I've seen – and I have seen a lot of this game in the past year – False Princess Iruruu is a particular combination of ideas and themes unlike anything I've tried. I look forward to one day playing it and seeing if it holds up in practice. Now we just need a release date.

Studios behind new Sekiro anime adaptation confirm it's "fully hand-drawn" following accusations of AI use: "Fans can look forward to the same artistry and precision that defined the original game."