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+

Legend of Grimrock

What? A first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, on Steam? Did they remake one of the classics? Apparently not. Legend of Grimrock is a successor to games like Eye of the Beholder, delivering primarily on the aesthetics of discovery, challenge and fantasy. The genre was long thought dead, succeeded in some aspect by the Roguelike. But the Roguelike typically has randomly generated dungeons, and as a result doesn't deliver on discovery nearly as well. Will the perilous Mount Grimrock survive scrutiny?

Grimrock uses real time in all of its systems. Fighting snails? Real time. Staring at a puzzle? Real time. Inventory sitting open while you brew potions? Hope you're watching for ogres. All of this plays into the game's food system, a hunger gauge that declines in, you guessed it, real time. When a character's hunger gauge dips very low, that character stops regenerating health and energy, leaving life far more difficult for the party. Food is fairly scarce, encouraging the player to either explore for food or rush the dungeon.

Rushing through the halls of Grimrock will get you killed, both in the short and long term. In the short term, pit traps and poison traps will put you into undesirable situations (oh god, so many cave slimes), while the long term will leave you starving and underprepared to face the growing dangers of the mountain. This game is an excellent example of how to make player exploration feel rewarding and necessary. Rather than giving you what you need on the beaten path, like most games of the day, most good items are tucked away in the mountain's many secret areas, rewarding the player for careful consideration of clues and powers of observation. Several of these come down to "find the button", but overall the exploration is rewarding and exciting.

One less exciting aspect of the game is the combat. With the real time exploration comes real time combat, wherein you right click a given character's weapon to attack with it whenever it's off cooldown. You can either whale away the instant each weapon is available for use (boring but practical) or interrupt your opponent's attacks with your own, robbing the monster of their damage (the interesting way). The problem with this system is that you can just move into a different grid space after attacking, and the enemy monster will just move to follow you, devolving the combat into a short round of strafe attacking followed by a dead enemy. The few attempts to break this pattern up involve lots of monsters flanking you, but each of these situations (except the final boss, who is annoying for an entirely different reason) involves either finding a bottleneck or dying horribly. These combat gripes could have been easily solved by allowing the enemy an "attack of opportunity" whenever you attempted to move out of combat with it.

The music is... well, other than the title theme (and another version of the title theme in the end credits), there is no music. This is definitely not a minus, however, because you will be busy listening for monsters, opening doors, closing pit traps, and various other excellently placed audio cues to clue you into the goings on of the dungeon. This minimalistic use of sound was an excellent design choice and greatly helps the game's immersion.

The story is sparse, but effective. At the start, your nameless protagonists are cast into the mountain to be forgotten, but writing on the walls shows the presence of an intelligent designer. Over time you are beckoned by a mysterious voice in your dreams to an escape route at the bottom of the dungeon, and even begin to find notes from a previous delver named Toorum. A clear influence from EA's The Immortal shows, and the lack of direct interaction contributes to a growing feeling of paranoia and helplessness.

Genres don't die, they just evolve. That's the message Grimrock delivers to us. Almost Human have taken a genre thought dead for good, applied modern technology to it, and ended up with a product that delivers fully on a set of aesthetics no other game has for well over a decade. While this game gives by no means a perfect embodiment of the genre, its execution leaves me confident that the genre can continue to evolve.

Verdict: B+