The Spirit of the Samurai Review (PC) – Reanimation

The Spirit of the Samurai feels like a game that shouldn’t exist. It’s a combination of Kurosawa and Harryhausen movie-making from the turn of the 1960s – think Jason and the Argonauts meets Yojimbo – but somehow in the form of a game made with today’s technology. There are some styles you barely expect to find in a modern video game and rotoscoped stop motion is one of them.  

The style and design choices of Spirit of the Samurai are about as aggressively anti-current gaming market as you’re likely to get. Deep careful storytelling, meticulous detailed art direction, dripping with as much atmosphere as gore. No microtransactions, no online, no corporate control.

However, that incredible art direction and unique approach seems to have come at the cost of making a game that’s actually much fun to play. Janky controls, fiddly and unresponsive combat and platforming that is punishingly imprecise, The Spirit of the Samurai is more spectacle than substance.

The Last Samurai

After a spirit fox gives him a brief warning of impending doom, out of his depth samurai warrior Takeshi is bludgeoned and left unconscious as his village-fort burns around him. Oni have descended and the dead have risen to attack the townsfolk. Into the aftermath of horror and demons, Takeshi and his trusty kitten set out to rid the village and surroundings of monsters and end the threat.

Without spoiling the plot, I’ll say that you also get to use two other avatars; Takeshi’s kitten Chisai has their own stealth platforming sections, and a Kodama tree spirit with his own Kodama also descends into a maze of underground tunnels.

It’s a dark and disturbing story, beautifully told by an old fox spirit with the most majestic fur coat you’ve ever seen. The variety of the different sections is welcome, but neither the kitten nor the Kodama’s sections really felt fully realised or worth taking the time to create. Narratively they served little purpose, and even Takeshi is a one-dimensional samurai in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Harryhausen of the Dead

The Spirit of the Samurai is predominantly a 2D metroidvania with a dose of test-your-patience combat without the meat to really back it up. There are platforming sections that leave you constantly misjudging the edges of jumps, or without visibility to see where the next jump even is. I had to just leap-of-faith a few times. Ezio would have been proud.

The stealth kitten sections were frustrating throughout as it’s very difficult to work out what to do and what is foreground or background, or what is interactive or not interactive. For example, fire. Sometimes flames smolder beautifully in the background and you can safely walk past and sometimes, essentially identical flames sit in the mid-ground of the level and suddenly you have a burnt kitten.

You also have some very retro feeling systems – menu-screen UI that would have felt at home on a PC in the early 90s, imprecise platforming controls, and being required to manually pick up everything except experience points, to name a few. The items you do pick up serve little purpose and beyond a restrictively simple levelling system and shop, there’s nothing much else to do with them.

Kitten Assassin

And the game is hard, like tempered katana-steel hard. Even the first few screens of the village will test your patience, let alone your skill.

Combat is a strange beast in that it looks like retro Mortal Kombat because of the stop motion, gore and size of avatar etc on screen, but plays close to a 2D soulslike. Even then, it’s still its own thing. I haven’t encountered, until now, a system where health and stamina are essentially the same bar, although it doesn’t quite behave like stamina, more like a kind of rejuvenating defence.

In essence, you can attack as much as you like, even though you are relatively slow, and the gauge won’t deplete. But take a hit and your health bar will retract, only to fill again after a second or so, as long as you aren’t continuing to tank hits. If the full bar is depleted then you lose a life, and you have three lives. But start sprinting for example and it behaves just like a stamina bar and stops you in your tracks after a few moments. It feels frustrating because there’s virtually no point to the mechanic.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Actual combat is right on the cusp of being too janky to play with reliable skill. You have a few basic directional combos, although most of the time I just used the forward one. And you have a roll, run and a parry. The parry allows you to momentarily off-balance your opponent, and hopefully start a combo they can’t block, but it’s only the scantest time they pause. More useful is having your kitten jump on their head and getting your free hits in that way, but that’s story-specific and only happens for a short time.

Enemies are a mix of undead samurai for the most part, especially early on, and then more and more Oni, from Tengu to spider things. Most can be parried with a bit of practice and although I don’t think the enemy difficulty was cheap, they are really hard, and take some practice to reliably fight. The sort of jank and sort of stop-motion lag maybe when fighting seems to detract from the smoothness you want in combat.

And fuck the archers with a dull blade. They really are cheap. Every time an archer appears on the right of the screen you are likely to lose a life, as they are too fast and too strong. You cannot close the distance on them quick enough not to lose at least one bit of life. Instead, the best strategy was to hit them with three of your own barbed missiles straight from the hip. I lost count of how many times an archer in particular was the end of my attempt at a section.

Takeshi and the Argonauts

So away from the negatives of combat and platforming, Spirit of the Samurai dazzles with its stop-motion animation. You often cannot tell where the stop-motion and the computer animation take over from each other. The animation is seamless, often jaw-droppingly detailed, and atmospheric as all get out. The Spirit of the Samurai has more atmosphere in its first few screens than most games manage in dozens of hours. The pre-photography that must have gone into it is extraordinary, the lighting and shadow are some of the most evocative you’ll have ever seen in a video game. When the fog rolls in and you descend into a Limbo-esque mid-ground of silhouette to fight your first stop-motion samurai battle it’s heady stuff. There’s also some really nice voice acting, especially the fox spirit telling the tale.

There’s also high difficulty outside of combat. The lack of checkpoints is tough, and not always on the right side of fair. You’ll get very sick of having to redo the same slightly janky slightly tricky, leap of faith platforming bits, only to run into two archers or a pit and have to do it all over again multiple times. When five and even ten minutes of careful play went down the drain just a few times too many I did start to get frustrated.

I did encounter one horrendous game-breaking bug. When swapping out combo portions in the combo menu, a glitch happened that removed the opening part of each combo. This meant I simply couldn’t attack at all. The button had been disabled, and there was simply no toggle to turn it back on. And of course, while you’re trying in vain to regain the ability to use the attack button, you run right past an auto-save shrine, and that’s it, that save is cooked. A Samurai with his Katana permanently in its sheathe will not survive long against hordes of Oni. Thankfully the first time this happened was only one hour in, and I could justify restarting, and then basically never changing combo combinations for the entire game.

The Spirit of the Samurai is a game where what is done well is undone by what’s undercooked. The amount of jankiness in combat, imprecise-feeling platforming, and numerous glitches outweigh the beauty of its animation and graphics. I don’t know if these choices were deliberate or if the game needed longer in development, but the end result feels unfinished. It’s always frustrating when a game has aspects that are so strong, that in the end, on the balance of the whole, the score has to be so disappointing.

The Spirit of the Samurai is now available on PC via Steam (review platform).

Developers: Digital Mind Games

Publisher: Digital Mind Games, Kwalee Gaming

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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