Mark of the Ninja

Ah, the stealth game. Why do you feel so much like a niche market lately? Nobody seems to have put any out this year, except for Mark of the Ninja, a 2D game where you drop chandeliers on angry guards. As in any other stealth game, the core aesthetic is challenge, but this one seems to have a secondary focus on narrative. Will my emotional heartstrings be stabbed repeatedly in the gut? Will this stealth title be able to stand out above all the rest? Is there even any competition?

A ninja murder spree is all about options, and this ninja's options are generally loads of fun to use. The main gimmick of the game involves giving visual sight ranges and sound ranges, so you can know in advance what will alert the enemy and what won't. This mechanic is awesome. It takes a good deal of guesswork out of these multiple-answer puzzle games (most answers involve hiding the bodies). Another gimmick lets you stop time to aim your dart and item throws, which is rather silly, but was probably thrown in to compensate for the 360 controller. The game gives you a decent variety of tools, including a grappling hook, noisemaker, smoke bombs, spike mines, and a cardboard box. You can use these tools along with your trusty sword to sneak (or slice) your way through several obstacle courses full of guards.

The game does a great job of giving you multiple ways past your obstacles. In a given room with multiple guards, you can generally:

• Hide behind various busts and potted plants, moving forward while the guards' backs are turned
• Find a vent that connects to the room, and use it to bypass most of the guards
• Distract them with a noise, perhaps by breaking a light or throwing a noisemaker
• Find another route, bypassing the room entirely
• Take out all the lights and hide away, picking off the guards one by one while nobody else can see them
• Kill the sniper on the floor above and throw his body down the vent, landing on one of the guards and terrifying him so much that he accidentally shoots both of his dogs, one light and the other guard, then descend upon him with your blade like a hammer of judgement 

 Some methods are more apparent than others. It's always possible to play through the game nonlethally (With your assassination targets as obvious exceptions), even if it's far more fun to drop a spike mine behind a balcony sniper so that when the other guard comes up to check on him, the guard's piercing scream of agony terrifies the sniper into falling off the balcony to his death...

The music is... I dunno, ninja-y stuff? Pretty unmemorable. The sounds are decently cool, being able to hear guards before you can actually see them is nice, if unnecessary since all sounds are given as visual feedback also. Being able to hear a guard's scream of terror after I throw a body off a balcony to land right behind him is quite satisfying. Some of the guards have conversations, but though the dialogue is voice acted well enough, it's rather poorly written.

Speaking of poor writing, this game also tries to have a secondary focus on narrative. Levels either start or end with cutscenes of ninjas and guards doing ninja and guard things. The protagonist is adorned with the Marks, a series of tattoos that give incredible ninjapowah, but are known to drive their users mad. During levels, a female ninja (who I like to call Exposition Girl) fills you in on why you're infiltrating a given building, where you should go next, et cetera. With maybe one or two exceptions, she is entirely unnecessary and unhelpful to your mission.

It is clear that the developers don't know how to integrate narrative with gameplay. At a certain point in the game, your character has to walk right at about half his sneaking speed for 30 seconds while Exposition Girl explains to you that the good guy is actually bad. There is basically no foreshadowing of this plot point. I'm convinced they had just killed the bad guy six hours into the game and realized they needed a longer play time. That's technically a spoiler, but my point here is that nobody came to this game for a narrative aesthetic, and making people sit through one anyway diminishes the game greatly. To further demonstrate that, the final level of the game consists of a cutscene, followed by walking slowly to the right for about three minutes, followed by picking one of two endings, both of which are utterly disappointing. Bad indie developer. No rent.

At the end of the day, this game's heaping load of praise seems to have come primarily from the utter lack of competition. The mechanics are fun to play with for a while, and the obstacle course levels are fun to mess around in, but the secondary narrative focus is a complete flop and repeatedly pops in to ruin my fun. The game's worthwhile if you're upset about the lack of anything stealth this year, but anybody else could probably sneak past this game undetected.

Verdict: C+