May not get that many chances to talk about them, but I really like stealth games. The genre is not for everyone though. The usual method of running into a room and dispatching a group of foes is highly discouraged with how easily the player can be mowed down. Punished for trying to play in the fast and engaging way. A lot of modern gamers will either get turned down by stealth games or adjust one of the in-game settings to make the loud aggressive playstyle they prefer more possible. Which is sad, because stealth games require more care and attention than basic action games. You are conditioned to have high sensual awareness and an idea of what can come at you. Analyze a layout of enemies and where they patrol before putting a plan into action. Making use of the tools you have and knowing when to use them. Knowing that even if you do go loud how do you go back to being quiet quickly? These games are creative in a different sense, because what they lack in style and finesse they make up for with choice. The player is able to adapt on the fly and take different approaches.
Stealth is more favorable in the immersive-sim genre in my eyes, because these titles offer tons of choice and one specific game helped get stealth to where it is. Thief: The Dark Project and its sequel Thief 2: The Metal Age. It was that and the huge success of Metal Gear Solid which attached an interesting storyline to such a slow formula. Ever since then we have seen slews of amazing stealth games. Deus Ex which made you feel like a master spy in a complex cybernetic world of political corruption. Hitman and the recent World of Assassination trilogy focused less on hiding and more on blending within crowded spaces. Then my all time favorite Dishonored which attempts to be a modern adaptation of Thief, improve upon gameplay issues, and carve out its own identity. The second game is better, fight me on that opinion! Stealth has even managed to creep into other genres like survival and open world sandboxes. We don’t see as many great stealth games these days, but there’s a good one it usually rocks really hard. So yeah, I love to see more stealth games enter the market.
With each new title comes new ideas or takes. Ways to innovate or set new ground for future developers coming forth. A lot of stealth games have done this, but there’s no stealth game quite like Mark of The Ninja. A hand-drawn adventure about a ninja seeking revenge for their clan, but what sets it apart from other stealth games is the approach it goes for. Rather than place the player into a wide open 3D space it instead goes for a 2D space. Environments are shrouded in darkness and the player doesn’t have a clear view of everything around them. It sounds more limiting than these other big hits, but trust me when I say to you that Mark of The Ninja is the most traditional stealth game out there. It makes the most out of the limitations and short runtime, and succeeds in a couple areas I wouldn’t expect it to. It manages to transfer stealth into the 2D plane without sacrificing the core aspects which makes the genre great. Sure it was more challenging, but highly fulfilling by the end. Klei Entertainment are the ones who developed this game and a few days ago I managed to review one of their more recent projects, Griftlands. Became a huge fan of Griftlands and wanted to check out one of their previous games. I bought Mark of The Ninja during a holiday sale for three dollars, but never sat down to play it up until now. Decided to finally do it and luckily that time was well spent. Mark of The Ninja, as stated already, is great and despite its flaws is a stealth classic you shouldn’t skip out on. Today we’ll be talking about Mark of The Ninja and why it deserves your attention. Into the shadows my friends!
Story
The Hisomu clan, a tribe of ninjas who have been following the traditional ways for the longest time. Peace was maintained for centuries until the night of the raid. A group of heavily armed men working for Hessian, a corporation run by Count Karajan, break into clan territory and begin killing each member. Gunning them down and torturing them into revealing where the others lie. You play as a ninja, another member of the clan, but you’re different. Your body is laced with special irezumi style tattoos made out of an ink which grants you new powers. Increased sense, speed, and ferocity to gut those you stalk. Hundreds of years ago a merchant came to the clan and offered them this exact ink. He explained what it could do and the flower the ink was made from. Where the flower originated from so that if they needed more they could harvest these flowers. However, the merchant also stated the petals were made of poison and the side effects were devastating. The ink is painful and most bearers tend to suffer and have their minds breakdown, but you managed to pull through and gain the most tattoos.
You are the marked one, the member whom the clan choose to receive such gifts so that if tragedy were to ever strike they could send you out on dangerous missions that not even their most skilled fighters could complete. During the night of the raid you are awakened by the sound of gunfire. Your close friend Ora rushes into your room and states you have to escape immediately. You sneak through tight passageways, watch as the soldiers clear out the hallways, and obtain your sword. A blade specifically made for you and the strength you now hold. Time for some sweet revenge. You begin killing each soldier, one by one, until you find the leader of the clan being held hostage. You save him, Master Azai, and he congratulates you for your heroics. However, the job is not done just yet as Azai thinks more soldiers will pop up in the future. He then assigns you the task to infiltrate Hessian headquarters, and kill Count Karajan so that he may never harm the clan ever again. Ora and you then head out and hide amongst the shadows. Leaping across rooftops to rooftops. Time to become the master ninja.
Gameplay
Mark of The Ninja is a 2D stealth game and this is a complete change in perspective from the usual stealth games I would play. You are no longer moving in a complete three hundred and sixty degrees axis, but instead a horizontal and vertical one. This sounds more limiting, but the game still manages to offer tons of choices and opportunities to take while sneaking around wide open areas. It’s as simple as stealth gets and Mark of The Ninja sticks to those basics.
You navigate each room, take out guards when they aren’t looking, and try to hide from their line of sight. What makes it challenging for the player though is everything is shrouded in darkness. They don’t have the best indicators for what is front or behind them, so they will always have to be aware of what comes next. You can’t see a thing, but this also means your enemies can’t see a thing. You can use this to your advantage and lure your enemies into the darkness. Hide their bodies and hope their partners don’t find them. There’s tons of passageways and surfaces you can cling onto allowing the player numerous ways to navigate levels. Duck into an air vent and crawl towards the other side. Cling onto the ceiling or wall and wait for the enemy to appear below you. Take cover behind a vase and wait for the enemy to bypass. There are even objects you can interact with or destroy to lure guards away from their group mates. Some enemies like to stick with their friends or stand in one place where they can clearly see you, so you want to do whatever you can to avoid easily being caught. The shuriken is a tool you have infinite uses with. You can throw them at an eeny to lure them towards your location, but it’s smarter to strike a lamp as not only does it shroud the room in darkness but also lures the closest guards. They’ll run over, quickly search the area, and you have the ability to backstab them.
Traps will also be set up to alert enemies of your presence. Motion detectors, lasers which melt you into ash, or some lamps that are just indestructible and scan the area. Most likely there will be a circuit breaker nearby which you’ll have to destroy to deactivate these contraptions. Enemies come in a variety of forms and sometimes you’ll have to take different approaches to killing them. There are the basic guards, but eventually you’ll encounter shielded blokes who can’t be attacked from the front and are equipped with flare guns which light up the room. Snipers who once they spot you kill you instantly, dogs who can sniff your location, and brutes who can’t be easily killed and will have to be stunned with either powerful equipment or environmental hazards.
Speaking of equipment you have quite a few ninja gadgets besides the infinite shurikens in your pockets. There’s the smoke bomb which creates a cloud to hide in and blocks the sight of those melting lasers, noise makers which can lure enemies to where they are thrown, razor sharp mines which instantly kill any enemy that steps into it, and a late game power which basically turns you into Corvo Attano. These tools are incredibly useful, but have a limited amount of uses. They replenish at checkpoints, but the length between each point is quite long. Only use these tools when you think it's necessary. You can still beat the game without using every tool outside of their tutorials.
If an enemy does detect you they will alert surrounding allies and close into your position. You have one of two choices. Either take them out using hand to hand combat, run away and hide for a little bit. Hand to hand combat is mostly a last minute option or when one guy is left, because enemies kill you incredibly fast with the bullets they pack. It can feel frustrating at first, but this helps the player center around the stealth playstyle the game encourages. Final point to address is…. the point system. Weird that Mark of The Ninja has one, but the way they implement it surprisingly works. You gain points for every enemy you kill, body you hide, every time you hide from enemy sight, deactivate a trap, or successfully use a piece of equipment. You lose points whenever you get detected by an enemy or a guard finds a body. At the end of each level these points are added up alongside bonuses for a final score. These bonuses include side objectives, how many enemies you dispatched, how much you avoid being detected, and there’s even one for if you manage to not kill any enemies. The more points you rack up the more skill points you acquire. That’s right,
Mark of The Ninja has a skill tree otherwise a perk system and it actually works. The perks you unlock from this skill tree expand the ways you can stealth kill enemies and navigate. You feel stronger the more you invest into it. It’s a perk system done right. Other than that there isn’t much else I can say. This section was dragged out longer for what is the most basic stealth game you can find, but it’s a really well made one and none of the set ups are particularly unfair. We’ll address this more later. Hopefully you can kill Karajan, return home, and fulfill your role as an honorable warrior to the clan.
Thoughts
Mark of The Ninja is good, great even, and is one of the many gems which deserve to be praised alongside other titles in the stealth genre. There’s a lot of elements which the game nails down right and even though there are a couple corners where it falls short all the pros outweigh the cons. It’s fun, challenging, balanced, and uniquely presented.
The art style is what I want to address first. It reminded me of Samurai Jack. I haven’t actually watched it, but heard great things about it . I don’t know why Mark of The Ninja reminded me of Samurai Jack. Part of it can be due to the cartoonish look, scenes which look like they swiftly strike a canvas with a brush, and how mature their story themes are. However, one of them is more tame and the other is really gorey. Not saying that’s bad though. Mark of The Ninja has a completely hand drawn art style which I love to see from indies, and the cutscenes are brought to life as well. It’s smooth, fluid, and never felt rigid. Klei Entertainment made the most out of the style and I love it. Only complaint is that the voice acting tends to suck, and the expressions in the voices don’t always match with dire moments or how the characters are. Other than that it’s great. There is one feature I want to address and it might bother some people. The game has a lot of color, but it doesn’t want you to see that color since levels are always covered in darkness. Everything is made of shadows, and this can give off a really bleak look. However, it worked for me as the way the shadows and dark palette were used helped give off this sinister feeling. Watching the outline of our character slowly creep onto his foe, grab them by the throat, and create a rainbow of red. It’s cool and the animation quality would be maintained in future titles.
The story is interestingly presented and starts off as this stereotypical revenge plot. The master of clan Hisomu looks and dresses stereotypically, the corrupt private military leader acts and speaks comically evil, and the game always reminds the player of the culture which Mark of The Ninja was based off of. Through the sounds, architecture, and even scrolls and shrines you can find scattered throughout levels. It’s a culture I love and always willing to sink my achilles tendon back into. It’s all pretty normal until the twists kicks in. This is where I begin to discuss the second half of the plot, so if you don’t want to get spoiled then skip to the next paragraph. Otherwise you have been warned. Later on you figure out the clan master has stolen weapons and high tech equipment from the enemy so that the clan could use them. Through scrolls you discover the clan is running out of those flowers used to create the superpowered ink, and they need a new method of power for when it finally runs out. They needed to adapt. That’s not even the biggest twist as the game goes complete Spec Ops: The Line later on. Do you remember how the ink tends to bend the minds of its bearers. Well it turns out Ora, your best friend and the one helping you out throughout the entire game, is a hallucination and instead a voice tempting you to commit mass murder. You have turned into a monster overtime and now find joy in killing those you hate. It blew my mind for a bit until the game offered a moral choice. To either kill the clan leader and become a demon of death, or kill our friend which means killing yourself and ending the cycle of death. Now the story was getting interesting up until this point, because it feels like a moral choice implemented pretty poorly. It’s done so late into the game and there’s not enough adding up to it. Not saying either ending is bad or the wrong option, but they could have led up to them much better. Mark of The Ninja has a pretty good story worth witnessing and the both endings are satisfying on their own. It's just I wish there was more build up and the execution could have been better.
Final thing we’ll address is the gameplay once more. It’s fun, but it’s more challenging than any of the stealth games I've played before. The benefit of having a 2D stealth game is that it’s much easier to have sensual awareness or an idea of what can be in a room now that everything is on a horizontal and vertical axis, but remember you have only four directions to work with. Levels place you into tight corridors and it can be confusing on where to go next. Hand to hand combat feels awkward to perform and I’m surprised we don’t use our sword to attack up close. There’s a lot of trial and error, but that’s kind of normal for a stealth game. You repeat the same scenario over and over until the most optimal route is formed. It feels satisfying when you finally execute the perfect plan and clear out a room of enemies. Some opportunities are set up in such a way where they immediately catch the player’s eyes and make them take it. Checkpoints aren’t that far apart and sometimes the game will autosave in spots that are just right. It’s challenging, but it’s fair and that’s the type of get up I like to see.
Mark of The Ninja is probably the best example of how to take the stealth formula and apply it to another dimension. It’s not perfect, but it definitely is worth checking out to see how it executes its ideas. Fun gameplay, nice visuals, well presented story, and a bit of replay value. Luckily the remastered version improves performance and it goes on sale for a pretty dirt cheap price, so wait until that happens and pick the game up. In the end I am going to give Mark of The Ninja an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
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