We tend to overvalue novelty in games, urging each one to offer something we've never seen before. I also just wanted to soak up more of its detailed pixel artwork, which fills story scenes with atmosphere, and bespoke animations for everything from drinking tea to petting a cat. The story is pure anime, but it has heart. Your ability to rewind time isn't just an arbitrary mechanic, but narratively justified, and you discover elements of the Dragon's backstory via recurring visits to your therapist and mission giver, during conversations with your neighbours, and in your dreams. It's the story that I was playing for, however. One level in a nightclub adds vision cones to the enemies and you hide by joining in with crowds of dancers, while another lets you play as a different character with a different attack. I'll take Katana Zero over it any day.Īcross its three or four hours, new twists are introduced, including variations on enemy types, throwable weapons, and minibosses. Compare this to My Friend Pedro, a recent game with a similar set of elements about which the opposite is true: it always looks better to play than it feels. Your reward instead is the muscle memory that now resides in your fingers and the satisfaction of being able to execute it. I watched these, sometimes, but stripped of colour and attack effects, Katana Zero loses its visual appeal. I'd entered a flow state.Īt the end of each level, you're presented with a fuzzy, black and white VHS replay of your flawless victory. I was edging forward constantly either way, my mastery over each scenario increasing until encounters that killed me 4 or 5 times had been despatched a dozen more times entirely by my now reflexive finger moments. There's no delay to restarting, such that fighting 3 guys 4 times feels no different than fighting 12 guys once each. Only now enemies on the floor above had heard the gunfire and were running towards me. Door, roll, slash, and this time I'd slow time and parry the bullet back at the shooter, killing him. Before I could move, I'd get shot by someone on the other side of the same room - try again. I'd slam the door into the goon, roly-poly invincibly past the second guy's attack, and slash him dead from behind. I'd burst into a room, using the slam of the door to kill one enemy, then slash at another melee attacker just ahead. Instead, I was constantly making progress as I worked out the order with which to take on enemies. This means I died a lot, but the instant restarts and frequent checkpoints meant I was never frustrated. Everyone dies in a single hit, both you and the enemies. This is a game about execution - pun intended.Īlongside your sword, you have the ability to slow time, to wall-jump, and to do forward rolls during which you're invincible. If the individual elements lack novelty, it hardly matters. The Hotline Miami comparisons don't stop with this violent repetition though: there's also an excellent synthwave soundtrack, a fetish for '80s VHS aesthetic, and that aforementioned story, which involves the criminal underworld, unclear motives, an unreliable narrator, and which is told mainly via between mission visits to your apartment. Each mission involves the Dragon arriving at a location and try-die-repeating your way through enemies until you reach your eventual target. Katana Zero casts you as the Dragon, a bathrobe-wearing assassin carrying, yeah, a katana.
You're also able to interrupt every line said to you, whether to bypass the story or to roleplay as a rude jerk, and doing so causes the text of the person speaking to scatter like smashed glass.Īll of this is important, because it turns out story is as much the appeal of this 2D platformer as its propulsive, Hotlime Miami-like ultraviolence. When in conversation, there's a timer during every player choice, and new dialogue options might open up at different points during that countdown. Words and phrases can be highlighted in different colours, and can further suggest intonation by animating wavily or by each letter shaking as if terrified.
During dialogue, words can imply the pace of speech by appearing letter-by-letter or thumping on screen one word at a time. Katana Zero has the juiciest text boxes I've ever seen.
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