I beat the game after just a couple days of casual play, but I personally haven’t yet gotten my fill of slow-mo bullet batting or cutting down four enemies in a single sword swing. Several hours at best, and likely less once it’s not your first playthrough. It doesn’t take long to run through the entirety of Katana Zero. Character development and choices abounding in a way I did not expect or sign up for, and I was more than fine with all of it. Having conversations with people in the hallway. Seeing my apartment and falling asleep on the couch with the TV on. What I wasn’t expecting was downtime between missions. You walk in, you kill all the witnesses, you ensure the targets’ demise, and you exit ahead of the police. You’re given dossiers with targets to track down. In your first couple levels, things are off to a great start. Without saying too much, Katana Zero’s story very quickly evolves into something unique. If you’ve played either Nier Automata or Undertale - two games that mess with the concept of save states and how they relate to the game itself - you’ll get where I’m going with your samurai’s precognition and his ability to think through a level to run it flawlessly. In a meta touch, the structure of the game itself is a mirror of what’s going on in the story the mechanics and the narrative are inextricably intertwined, and often what you see happening with your game mirrors the perspective of your protagonist. In the interest of keeping this spoiler free, I’m going to stay a bit vague, but something is going on here that I’ve seen in precious few games. Really, with this game going down the rabbit hole as it did, I can’t blame them for holding on to a few secrets. It was a clever statement, partially true, and partially obscuring something more there’s a one-liner early on that references precognition which I missed in my first run of the game. In talking with the developers at PAX East, they said to me this is how he’s planning the level out in his head until he runs it through for real. Then you get a replay done in the style of a black-and-white security camera feed playing back your perfect solution. “Yes, that should work,” your character says once you get it right. You run the level, starting again and again if you die, until you can run through it without taking a hit. The main feature is a time slowdown, a limited special power that allows you to react to gunfire or just give you that little bit of edge against certain, tougher foes. You’ve got your standard attack, jump, and roll buttons, but you can also interact with items in the environment, toggling switches or traps, throwing certain objects, and taking alternate paths through levels. On the way you’ll cut down dozens of enemies, leaving no witnesses. You are an assassin bankrolled by a mysterious group to take out-well it’s not made clear early on what ties your targets together, but you get the sense that these powerful people you’re after are somehow bad. The premise of Katana Zero is pretty straightforward. Toss on top of that the 80s vibe, the neon, the VHS style replays and framing of the game, and this was set to be my champion of indie action games I’d play and replay for months to come. I came because I saw the promise of a warrior so adept as to deflect bullets with his sword while running through levels, cleaving enemies and leaving streaks of blood across the walls like a classic samurai flick. I came to this game for its stylish artwork and crisp gameplay. In a lot of ways, my time with Katana Zero made me appreciate more and more what it is about games these days that draws me in, or rather what keeps me drawn in. Yet if you dig deeper, something else emerges. Are the controls tight, and does this game pack engaging mechanics that let you feel like a sword-wielding badass in a world of high caliber weaponry? You bet, and also it has a killer soundtrack! Buying it on these merits alone would be totally justified. Is it lovely in all its pixelated glory? Yes, without a doubt its setting paints an evocative and atmospheric, post-war dystopia. To take on Katana Zero simply as a review would be doing this game a disservice.
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