“Hotline Miami redone as a side-scrolling action-puzzle-platformer,”

April 19, 2019 5:03 AM

A Cyberpunk Ninja Game Where You Manipulate Time [Kotaku] “Katana Zero, a 2D action-platformer out today for Switch and PC, revolves around a time-manipulation idea that cleverly envelops both the story and the way you play. You play as a bathrobe-clothed samurai in a grimly pessimistic future city, a contract killer dependent on a drug dispensed by a sympathetic-seeming psychiatrist. The drug gives you the power to see forwards and backwards in time, letting you rewind after every death and slow down time to deflect bullets, but also prompts distressing hallucinations.” [YouTube][Game Trailer]

• Katana Zero: a game about death, death, death, and life [Polygon]

“A single success is often built upon countless failures” is hard to conceptualize in real life, but is obvious in the world of a video game. Numerous botched attempts through a stage can lead to the knowledge (or just simply precognition) required for survival. Most games are built upon this cycle, but few call attention to it. And for good reason. Acknowledging failure would spoil tension in a game’s story. What threat is a band of pirates to Nathan Drake if he’s immortal? Katana Zero is a game about this cycle, weaving the notion that “mastery that comes from defeat” into a gory tale of revenge and redemption. [...] The gameplay itself is well-executed but can’t quite live up to the presentational highs in Katana Zero. Combat sequences feel limited by a small number of variables, from enemy types to environments to interactive elements. The challenge increases in later levels, but generally this manifests as more enemies to kill or fewer projectiles to use. It begins to feel less like an open-ended action game with infinite possibilities and more like a puzzle game with just one or two ways of making it through each room.”

• Katana Zero: the cutting edge [Shack News]

“Crafting a master assassin means giving the player the tools to live that idea out. Katana Zero does this in spades. One-hit-kills are the name of the game, with the Dragon able to dispatch enemies in a single sword slash or a single thrown object. There are typical tough guy thugs, knife-wielders with pompadours, and shotgun-wielding weirdos to start. As the game goes on, the Dragon's adversaries gradually get more heavily-armed and slightly tougher to dispatch. Sure, one hit still does them in, but players have to memorize how to get the drop on them or how to get around their defenses. Success in Katana Zero is not about killing everyone in a berzerker rage. To succeed, especially in the later levels, players need to lay out a distinct pattern of which enemies to take out, where to use their dodge rolls, and how to use the surrounding environment to their advantage. And of course, they need to anticipate any surprises, because there are a couple of rooms where something can pop up out of the blue and force you to start the whole thing over again. It's a difficult game and it's not going to be for everyone, but Katana Zero does evoke that Hotline Miami spirit, in that it's entirely doable and it feels invigorating when it's done.”

• Katana Zero: A much-needed shot in the arm for sidescrollers [Nintendo Life]

“Though the gripping narrative is an enormous part of the overall experience, much of your playtime will be spent in side-scrolling action portions that end up feeling like a cross between the style of The Messenger and Hotline Miami. Every level is comprised of multiple screens, and before you can move onto the next screen, you have to kill everyone on the current one. You do this by doling out cold vengeance with the edge of your blade, but your samurai is far from invincible; he’s the very definition of a glass cannon. In just about every case, if you get hit once, you have to do the entire screen over again from the start, constantly trying new tactics and approaches until you get it perfect. Given the number of enemies you face, and the fact that most of them are armed to the teeth, this single-minded focus on perfection would seem to be too tall an order, but it’s perfectly balanced out by the Chronos pumping through the samurai’s veins. A big plot point throughout the narrative is how Chronos grants its users the gift of precognition, so every level you’re playing is actually the samurai gazing forward through time and planning out the perfect murder route through scores of guards.”

posted by Fizz (11 comments total)

Very few reviews call out how absolutely bonkers the video effects are. Screenshots show that nice chunky vaporwave aesthetic, but dying, pausing, and the final playblack all use the styling of a classic....

The VCR. Dying does the little screen tearing from rewinding a tape, pausing takes to to a crappy looking VCR menu, the final playback has controllable fast forward and reverse... It's very impressive.
posted by Anonymous Function at 7:02 AM on April 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

This game, along with The Messenger show that you can still do some really amazing things with this old-school retro aesthetic. It may hearken back to the Ninja Gaiden era but the actual gameplay and design are more intricate and nuanced.
posted by Fizz at 7:13 AM on April 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Not a huge fan of the character art but I do really love hi-bit silky smooth pixel animations. The music sounds great also.
posted by ropeladder at 8:54 AM on April 19, 2019

The hallucination bit is intriguing. There was a game for the GameCube called Eternal Darkness, where your character(s) had a sanity meter. As your sanity decreased, you started experiencing hallucinations. And the way they pulled it off was really, really good. I'll probably buy it just for that.
posted by xedrik at 11:53 AM on April 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

Gotta admit the bit in the trailer where she hits a guy so hard his dialogue balloon breaks, scattering broken letters everywhere, probably quadrupled my interest in this game.
posted by straight at 2:02 PM on April 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Bad Gals vs. Vapor Gangster
posted by rhizome at 3:02 PM on April 19, 2019

I’m very intrigued by this, but I just bought Cuphead and I’m worried that I have learned that I don’t much care for “do the thing perfectly or start over.” On the other hand, that might just be a problem with Cuphead’s specific implementation?
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:29 PM on April 19, 2019

After having read the description, I realize it's somewhat different, but I found it surprising that none of these articles (as far as I could tell from reading a few and Ctrl-f-ing the rest) make any mention of Braid.

Also,

You play as a bathrobe-clothed samurai

Um...is it really supposed to be a bathrobe?
posted by dubitable at 5:33 PM on April 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Um...is it really supposed to be a bathrobe?

Canonically, from dialogue early in the game, it is a bathrobe. Unless the main character is being sarcastic.
posted by cardioid at 5:11 AM on April 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I’m worried that I have learned that I don’t much care for “do the thing perfectly or start over.” On the other hand, that might just be a problem with Cuphead’s specific implementation?

The question with these games is always "How long does it take to get back to where you were?" Most classic platform games are a major nuisance with going out to the level select screen then playing through a minute's worth of level to get back to the point where you failed last time. More modern hardcore platformers like Super Meat Boy or Celeste don't take you back more than about 20 seconds at the longest (to the start of the screen or the level).

I've never played Cuphead but I believe it takes you back right to the start of the level, meaning that you have to do the easy bits all over again - which gets annoying.
posted by Francis at 7:03 AM on April 23, 2019

I bought this, based on this post, and beat it. I didn't like it. Whatever feeling of satisfaction the reviewers in the linked articles were talking about was mostly absent for me. Instead of feeling like I had pulled off the perfect series of kills, it felt more like I bumbled into each stage, killed a bunch of guys through sheer luck after a bunch of failed attempts and then it was over. I felt less like John Wick, and more like Johnny English. Even the replay, which shows how you beat each stage in "real" time didn't give me any satisfaction, because I knew that I didn't intentionally dodge that explosion and that I only reflected that bullet because I was mashing the attack button.

Also, I thought the story and dialogue were pretty poorly written. It didn't know if it was a satire of some sort of cyberpunk action movie or something more straightforward so the tone felt all over the place. I liked the look of it though? Actually if you like the aesthetic of this game but want a better game with a more consistent tone I'd recommend Hyper Light Drifter instead.
posted by runcibleshaw at 4:19 PM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]