May 20th, 2019
Death in video games can be a weird thing, and it means different things to different people. Some take it too harshly, seeing it as a penalty that defeats one’s enjoyment of the game, while others see it as a challenge, one that demands you do better if you wish to succeed. Devolver Digital has always had a strange relationship with death in their games, most notably in Hotline Miami where death was so constant that it took less time to reload a checkpoint than it takes to blink, and they continue exploring what it means to die in a video game in their newest title: Katana ZERO.
The most important thing about repetition is how you learn, but few games properly illustrate how video game characters learn from failure. In Katana ZERO your failures are actually a plot point as the player character has the power of precognition, allowing him to plot out attack paths before actually putting himself in any real danger. This is how the gameplay is presented to you as you enter each new area, with our bathrobe samurai turning on his headphones and planning his route as you play, with each death met by a comment of “no, that won’t work” and a quick restart to the beginning of the room. Once you complete the area and run to the exit the main character will say “yes, that will work” and you see a replay of your successful run through the area at regular speed.
I say “regular speed” because you can slow down time in Katana ZERO, though its only real use is to reflect bullets back at gunmen with the swing of your sword. This gives the game a very stylish feel once you finally finish an area and get to watch yourself reflect a half dozen bullets back at your attackers at regular speed, though sometimes once you’ve finished an area you just want to move on. Outside of your sword shenanigans you can also pick up various items like bottles and knives to kill enemies at a distance, or smoke grenades to prevent enemies from seeing you. Many enemies have guns, however there’s a few more obnoxious ones that will block your attacks and stagger you to delay any follow-up attacks. The enemies that are the biggest threats to you will be SWAT Teams with shotguns, since you can’t block their buckshot, but enough deaths means you’ll eventually learn how to maneuver around them.
Speaking of maneuvering, the game has several sections that encourage you to go in with stealth and it berates you when you fail to do so. These areas, outside of one early on, appear to be 100% optional and really do nothing but slow the game down, especially when certain enemies have very touchy and inhuman hearing. The worst part about it all, which you’ll certainly notice more than once, is that the constant pattern of resetting the game appears to sometimes hurt the enemy’s pathing, to the point where some areas become impossible to navigate when any given number of enemies somehow have different patrol routes. This does nothing more than further encourage you to go full slasher film, and since it doesn’t appear to affect the story I would highly encourage it.
If you’ve played Hotline Miami you’ll probably recognize the story’s framework early on. You’re an assassin that is inexplicably good at killing a lot of people, and you get orders for who to kill from an unknown organization while you may more may not be going insane. This leads to many scenes that you don’t necessarily know if they’re real or not, but it also helps create a number of fun spectacles and interesting scenes that use your ability to “time travel” in ways that you don’t always see in games like this. That being said, if you’re looking for a game that’s just nonstop action from start to finish then these scenes will probably get on your nerves. Nothing ruins your flow going through a level than a four minute cutscene out of nowhere, though fortunately you can mostly button mash through the dialogue.
It’s a shame that so much of the game is layered in exposition, because Katana ZERO is criminally short. I finished the whole game in under five hours (though for fifteen dollars that’s not terrible), and the story ends with a “To Be Continued” and teases of upcoming free DLC and possibly a second playable character. This and promises of a “challenge mode” coming later means there will be more content to sink one’s teeth in later, but in its current state you might feel like you’re watching an action movie with the last three scenes cut out. Regardless, I enjoyed Katana ZERO far more than Hotline Miami simply because you can see what’s in front of you compared to Hotline Miami’s top-down view, but if you were ever interested in or enjoyed either of the Hotline Miamis then you should like Katana ZERO as well.
