Mark of the Ninja: An actual ninja game

"Stealth game" is a confusing and often contradictory path to follow down in any gaming discussion. You will often hear of it in extremely mixed tones. Forced stealth section is uttered by some gamers in the same way a lad or lass might discuss their latest date getting food poisoning mid-way through coitus. On the other hand, stealth genre done right is spoken in low, reverent whispers, like finding the holy grail and its hot sister, the holier grailia. There's also a middle ground, which is generally made up of high pitched whining. Reviews of DX:HE often shrieked about how sometimes you couldn't manage to not kill someone and reading people discuss Crysis games has always been unbelievable. The usual complaint being that the Crysis suit powers were "too wimpy", because turning nearly invisible before point blanking someone with a shotgun is a really wimpy power.
 
Mark of the Ninja is a stealth game, and thankfully sold as one, so people didn't begin shrieking like a wounded squirrel at it. You would think that a ninja game would advertise that alone, but for generations ninja has basically meant 'samurai who kicks people and throws smokebombs'. I can't even fully blame Naruto with its brain damaged orange jump suit wearing lead character, as the West has had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles going for almost my entire lifespan. There's actually a fair bit of common ground between the two eve. Given ninjas might be very well made up in the first placenesides...

I digress. Mark of the Ninja is about a ninja of the assassin-y type, which is actually not as cool as I would have liked. It has a pretty tight revenge for the Clan plot which ... Honestly, I wish you just did ninja missions megaman style. You know like, steal Woodman's grain, swindle Metalman's strongbox, leave Gutsman's corpse swinging by his robo-innards in the temple gate... I'm getting off track here, but wouldn't that be cool? Regardless, Mark of the Ninja is a 2D platformer and good lord does that ever fix so many issues with stealth games. Admittedly many of those issues could be fixed but Mark of the Ninja straight up equates sound traveling distance, sight lines and patrolling paths in a really tight way that almost surprises you in how robust it is.

Almost like they really did want to make a ninja game or something.

The fellows behind Mark of the Ninja are Klei Entertainment, who unbeknownst to me previously are a Canadian studio. (Tangentially noting one of the guy in Klei worked at Relic, which is mentioned as "Sega's Relic" at the time of his leaving ... Good to see Wikipedia is working towards all true imperialists and erasing history, yeesh) They've done platformers previously, the I have no idea how good or bad it is Shank, as well as Eets and Don't Starve, the latter of which I've heard is fantastic but haven't picked up yet since my backlog ever grows.

Being a platformer done in the modern style, Mark of the Ninja is very nice visually although never all that impressive. This is fundamentally intentional, as the game is built around a very firm attempt to equate information to you visually. Most of it is drab and grey, with color only fiercely appearing alongside your enemy - Light. Being too busy would take away from your ability to discern things at a glance, so while the game can feel a bit lifeless in parts it's a well made choice. Of course this somewhat depends on the level you're in, with some of them being really interesting even in their drabness, and others illuminated by lightning to bring out the color from time to time.

One thing I ... Really want to hit the developers in the face over is the few times the game splashes color in your face, little challenge arenas. It flashes the screen hard white and hey, I understand what they were going for, but making me feel disoriented and rub my head is not nearly as clever as to be worth doing it. Most of the time Mark of the Ninja is soothing to the eyes though, which is what makes that stand out.

The actual gameplay of MoTN is a mixed drink, a cocktail of delights with some grit in it. The stealth aspect, as you have likely inferred, is very much the focus of the game. You have a large bag of tricks to sort through and in many ways your abilities all get used and repeatedly. Your ninja runs, jumps, climbs and uses a variety of options to manage his way through various levels. And here's kinda where the issues come in.

Because your ninja can ninja in many exciting manners, the game just has a ton of buttons and at times I find I have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy the style because of it. Most of the buttons are contextual, with very different outcomes based on slightly different situations. You not only need to stop and plan out your next couple moves, you need to really stop and make certain where those moves are going to work. This isn't to say the controls are bad, just a bit thoughtful and I can find the game less than relaxing at times. You die almost every time you make an accident, which leads to an apprehension that the controls don't lie well beside. I don't think there's a less enjoyable part of the game than the challenge rooms, which tend to really highlight just how frustrating the controls can get. I imagine that's their challenge entirely, given they're not exactly intellectual puzzles but I just found them irritating. Getting one shot killed three times in a row when attempting to do a puzzle that requires a minute of equally careful precision just ... Loses its appeal.

If I want to do something that tricky, I'll go bake croissants, not play an indie ninja game. You know what I get when I bake croissants? Croissants. Which are delicious. You know what I get when I die after a couple minutes of tedium to a one shot kill laser? A groan and the starting of a headache. I'm certain there's people who will dig them, so that's cool. They're optional so I just stopped doing them, maybe they got better.

I largely really enjoy the trickiness outside the optional challenge rooms. The exception is I don't really consider the one hit kill lasers to be really quite as delightful as the designers must have, since they're absolutely dominant at some points in the game and come in huge batches. The laser puzzles strongly resemble the laser puzzles in Rochard, which is on some levels a very similar style of game. Whereas Rochard was probably a worse game to most people, the laser puzzles in Mark of the Ninja rely on two things - A little bit of puzzle, and a lot of fighting with the controller. As I said earlier, the control scheme is highly contextual. For example, let's say you're riding a crate through a laser puzzle. You angle down until you reach the bottom of the side and then have to press A to grab onto the bottom. Misclick, you die, and you may not even realize that you misclicked.

Combat in the game is rough and kinda sucks, which is basically why you die outside of infinite lasers. It gets to the point where you legitimately don't care to engage in combat - I don't mean assassination, which is always vaguely exciting since you need to get ever so close to it - But engaging the enemy is a pain and you have to knock them down before you can kill them, which often ends up having to knock them down again. I understand it's naive to bring a sword to a gunfight, but if you're in melee why in ninja's name are you punching? You are actually at quite a disadvantage against even a single enemy, which just feels irritating. Even when you do somehow knock them down they often slip away, or the context sensitive 'kill enemy button' doesn't seem to work. It's like a hyper sensitive QTE and ugh, just not quite where I'd like it to be.

The big problem with the combat being so bad is you won't enjoy any combat at all after a while, which means another avenue of the game is closed. I'm not saying you should fake ninja your way through two or more enemies at a time, but if you can close to melee you should be able to usually take a guy and I've found you usually can't unless you spend points in some of the talents. It seems kinda weird to spend points on talents to do something you really, direly want to avoid. Stealth stops feeling like a reward and feeling like something you basically have to do. The other thing is the game can be very sensitive about those QTEs - a slight change in elevation for you or the guard, or just slightly off positioning, and nothing happens or you go back to punching.

Actually interacting with the guards outside of combat, however, is simply fantastic. You can distract and terrorize them in a myriad of ways, and much of the game is carefully nudging them to stand in just the right place. Assassinations, outside of the occasional QTE insensitivity, all feel really slick. Especially the later moves where you leap from hiding on weird angles, or descend from above like a proper murder Batman. It's also really nice how enemies don't instantly set off alarms - You have a couple seconds, and you can use body discovery to move enemies around, rather than them instantly going into alarm mode which has never made any sense. How enemies react has tons of personality too, although it can get repetitive it's still pretty neat.

Mark of the Ninja is a big success both as a stealth game, in which it conveys so much more useful data than any other stealth game I've ever played, but also as a puzzle platformer. Though the game does narrow solutions down here and there, you really don't feel like you have to figure out some odd click puzzle to get past things. And sometimes the puzzle element can be skipped if you're not worried about score, or you can just kill people instead. The game gives you more than enough idea as to what is going on to enjoy both the stealth and puzzle elements most of the time, giving you a very solid gameplay experience.

My only real slight on Mark, beyond the fact that the combat is probably a bit too weighted against you to even bother with, is that frankly I didn't care at all about the story and found the ending a bit too "artistic" to really suit the game. The game itself is very artistic and tons of talent went into its presentation, so don't get me wrong here - My complaint is I wish it just told a story with action and levels, rather than yammering on at you about 'the mark' and so on.