The guys at Klei Entertainment had the first demo available to play at PAX East, and it was a sight to behold. It takes you through a bunch of jobbers, a few bigger guys and one beast of a boss over the course of one stage.

The controls are simple and intuitive. You switch effortlessly between a knife, a chainsaw and a few guns during combos, and you can also pick up smaller enemies and smack them around with your various instruments of pain.

You also have grenades, which are a joy to use. You don’t lob them so much as fling them, kunai style, and they explode on contact. It’s tremendously satisfying, and the quickness of the strike makes grenades perfect for suppressing anybody trying to sneak up behind you.

The most satisfying thing to do after you run out of grenades is is to pounce on the enemies. I don’t think the pounce would work without Shanks fluid visuals, because when you land on people, they react like they’re being landed on.

Plenty of games have stellar animation, but I don’t think I’ve every seen a 2D game that shows the interplay between the player character and his opponents as well as Shank does. Clearly, after the boss, Toro, runs into the wall and stands stunned with a flashing button above his head, the game is waiting to run the animation of you applying a chainsaw to his neck. But the second you try to grab the boss when he’s not stunned? That’s a different story. Whether you pounce at him or grab at him, he’s ready to fling you away like one of your grenades.

The Toro fight is bookended by short, sweet cut scenes. Shank doesn’t say a word, and it conveys so much. Shank is so cool, it’s like they’re not even trying (Wet developers could learn a few thousand things from Klei).

One thing bothers me, now that I’m back home and no longer in range of a developer to ask the question, is that the game was ridiculously easy. The difference between The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and Shank was night and day. I watched a few people play through the demo and not one finished with much of a dent in their life bar. People playing Vampire Smile were lucky to get through the first miniboss. I should have asked if the difficulty was scaled back for the floor demo, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

The gameplay trailer at the end of this post shows off the moves of someone a lot more familiar with the game than I could get in 10 minutes, and it’s actually got me hopeful. The person holding the controller is doing some impressive air combos. So the more complex combat is available, if you want it.

Below is the official gameplay trailer and a video I took of someone fighting Toro, the boss in the demo. Pay close attention to the parts where the player tries to grab Toro. Those are my favorite parts.