Mento's May Mastery '16: Day Thirteen: Ronin

Ronin

Between the two GB livestreams and the Beastcast I had very little free time left, so I only got past of the opening chapter of Tomasz Wacławek's Ronin today. That means I haven't quite yet received the full experience of the second-to-second madness of trying to stay alive in a room full of red lasers criss-crossing around where my helmeted avatar is presently floating. Yup, it's a flimsy excuse, but I knew going into this feature that I'd be pressed for time on some days. Fortunately, I've got enough to talk about with what little I played.

Ronin is a 2D stealth (though the game insists it isn't stealthy, since it's happy enough if you're just running around shanking fools in the open) action game where a helmeted assassin must hack every system on a stage, killing as many enemies as she can with just a katana and a surprisingly amount of physical agility. It differentiates itself from, say, the structurally similar Gunpoint by how it'll switch to a turn-based mode in the middle of a firefight, allowing the player to plan their next move before executing on it. Sometimes your options are limited; if you're in the air, for example, you'll continue falling to the ground on the next turn in the direction you were moving unless you choose to use your rope to swing away instead. There's a lot of trial and error as you get a sense of what you can avoid and when, and who to prioritize in a room of enemies with guns and swords (oddly, the sword guys are the bigger issue). That's essentially it: hack the computers by removing all their guards, kill all the guards without tripping alarms or killing civilians to "perfect" the stage, and then leave. Getting a perfect rating earns you a skill point for a pretty small tree of nonetheless useful skills, like stealth killing enemies from above or throwing your sword at someone (which you'll then have to run over and pick up again, unless you get a separate skill to recall it to your hand like a Jedi). It appears to be imperative to perfect the earlier missions for the skills they unlock to maximize the chances of defeating the later, harder ones.

But all that's just the basic synopsis. As for my thoughts on the game, I really wish I could get a bit further into it so I could start seeing the seams that people are told me are there - not that I should be looking too hard, of course, as living in the moment is always more important. There's a tough fight right at the end of the first proper assassination mission - the heroine is checking off a list of targets as she runs around in motorcycle leathers with a katana, like in that one movie (I think it was called The Bride That Couldn't Slow Down) - that I imagine sets the standard for the scenarios to follow: you have to micromanage the room, finding an opportunity to off each target but focusing on staying alive until those opportunities presents themselves. There's some incidental death you could hope for - I slashed one of the heavy samurai guys and sent him flying hard enough that he somehow took out of one the security goons - but the best bet is to separate enemies from the pack and finish them in relative peace. Divide and conquer. The game actually anticipates this, however: if you get a sufficient amount of distance away from a guy who knows there's a murderer on the loose, he'll phone it in which causes an alarm to go off and costs you your perfect mission rating, as well as summoning more goons to deal with. Keeping people busy is every bit as important as giving yourself some space to eliminate enemies without their friend(s) immediately blasting you away. I'd be curious to see if the game's later firefights will exhibit the same mix of exhilarating and methodical.

It's good that the game has a generous restart system though - it pretty much checkpoints after any terminal hack or before you trigger a fight - because it's very easy to get killed. Getting hit by an enemy's red line, which indicates the area of effect of their next attack, can happen more often than one might hope by the way it can catch your feet or head if you misjudge the distance of your jump. Likewise, the sword guys can chop you out of the sky from a certain distance away, and the rope swinging takes a few tries before you can correctly judge how far you'll swing for that turn. I'll just explain what I mean by that: Whenever you prepare to jump, the game creates a line of motion for where it will take you. Depending on its length or height, this line turns red at a certain point, and that indicates where you'll max out your "move" and it'll switch over to the enemies' turn before you'll come down to Earth. The rope doesn't offer a similar guide for where you'll end your turn after you use it, though, making it an unpredictable commodity. These are just nitpicks, really, and I'm sure I'll be able to compensate for them over time. For now, I'll reserve judgement until I'm a lot further in, at which point it should be easier to determine whether or not I want to see it through to the end. I'll start making some proper headway tomorrow, now that the weekend has begun.

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