Hard question to answer.

It's very much a "soulsborne" game in terms of the UI, how the engine feels, and many basic gameplay elements. So someone coming from another soulsborne game has some built-in familiarity with Sekiro.

At the same time, veterans of the Souls games (like myself) often found adapting to Sekiro extremely difficult, having to unlearn deeply ingrained muscle memory from Souls, to the point where my buddy, who sucks at Souls games, was able to pick up Sekiro much faster than me.

It is easily the hardest FROMSOFT game, imo, so I am hesitant to recommend it to a newcomer, but I also think a newcomer might ironically find it easier than a Souls vet would, lol

Either way, it's a masterpiece of a game. The combat is extremely tightly designed, the world is massive and beautiful, and the game offers a very surprising amount of content, to the point where I didn't mind the lack of multi-player.