It feels appropriate, when describing the delirious plot and set pieces of Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, to channel Bill Hader’s Stefon from SNL. The year’s hottest fusion of retro vibes and modern comforts is Ragebound. This place has everything: a buddy cop partnership between two ninjas—the earnest Kenji and the sardonic Kumori—the latter of whom resides, in spirit form, within the former’s body; a sequence, situated in a construction site, where you outrun a demon-operated bulldozer before plowing through fiends with a forklift; another level in which you escape a C.I.A. battleship via jet ski, fending off bomb-dropping helicopters and shirtless soldiers who wield naginatas atop WaveRunners.
Developed by the Seville-based the Game Kitchen and published by the Paris-based Dotemu, two burgeoning colossi in the world of stylish sidescrolling action titles, Ragebound brims with an invigoratingly maximalist B-movie attitude. But that over-the-top sensibility is undergirded by confidently minimalist design. You’re granted a modest toolset—a jump, a roll, and some attacks—and thrown into platforming and combat gauntlets that demand increasingly rapid and creative improvisation. The action becomes breezy, even meditative, as muscle memory kicks in—and what a delight when, after a few attempts at any given section, the precise choreography needed to navigate it reveals itself to you like a crack of lightning.
The main story’s baseline difficulty is quite measured, but each stage offers optional challenges for you to complete—say, slay a certain number of spectral samurai, or avoid every pit of spikes along the way. Then there’s the suite of gnarly unlockable missions, each plainly out for blood. But in a charming deviation from many of its peers, Ragebound takes few pains to be hardcore. The game’s pared-down but expansive mechanics and generous checkpoints make its trials feel both enticing and surmountable. In a world full of shinobi and imps and feds and floating skulls and God knows what else, who’s to say you can’t be a speedrunning completionist?
This game was reviewed with a copy purchased by the reviewer.
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