Sekiro — echoes of the dragon heritage

A 120 page lore book for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Every faction, character and secret — designed as a collector's edition hardcover.

problem

Sekiro's world is one of the most layered in gaming — feudal Japan filtered through dragons, immortality and cycles of violence that span centuries. But unlike a novel or a film, none of it is presented linearly. It's scattered. Buried. Deliberately obscure. A wiki can catalogue it. A book can make you want to read it. That's a different problem entirely.

solution

A 120 page hardcover designed to feel like an artifact from the world itself. Not a fan guide. Not a walkthrough. A collector's edition lore book — the kind that sits on a shelf and gets picked up again. Every chapter ordered so that the world reveals itself the way good fiction does. You start with the surface — the clans, the locations, the weapons. By the end you're in the cosmology. The Dragon's Heritage. Immortality and what it costs.

THE STORY

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice doesn't explain itself. The lore lives in item descriptions, NPC dialogue, environmental detail and deliberate silence. FromSoftware designed a world where understanding it is part of the challenge.

That's what makes it worth documenting.

THE DESIGN

Black throughout. No compromise. The game lives in darkness and so does the book.

Each character spread follows the same architecture — name as headline, lore as body text centred on the left page, full bleed illustration on the right. The centred typography wasn't a stylistic choice first — it was a narrative one. Centred text reads slower. It makes you pause. In a book about a world that punishes impatience, that felt right.

The cover uses the crossed blade motif from the game's iconography. Deep red linework on near-black. The title in white — the only clean thing in the composition.

THE CHALLENGE

120 pages in one month. The design was the easier half.

The real work was editorial — finding every piece of lore, understanding how it connected, then deciding what order to put it in so a reader who'd never played the game could follow it, and a reader who'd completed it three times would still find something new.

Getting that sequence right took longer than any single design decision.