The thing that Katana Zero really shares with Hotline
Miami, over and above the publisher, the super-violence, the story of
drug-addled killers, the glitchy way reality seems to be a corrupted
save file, and the enduring love of lurid, hangover pinks? The thing it
really shares is the awareness that a certain kind of punishing and
precise action game is always itching to turn into the robbery scene
from Groundhog Day. There's Bill Murray stood on the street corner. A
bullion van is unloading money. He walks across the road and starts
counting. One, two, three. Dog barks. Five. Car passes. Seven. Guard
spills quarters. Eight, nine, ten. He grabs the money and disappears. It
seems effortless, but it's hard work. Years of practice. He's done it
over and over to make it look that easy.
Katana Zero gives you a bit more to play with, of course. One, two,
three. Open the door and slice two guys to pieces. Five. Jump in
minecart. Seven. Hit signal to change tracks. Nine. Out of the mine cart
and use it as a shield against the laser grid. Ten, eleven, twelve.
Molotov cocktail and knock back incoming bullets.
Yet despite the variations - the mine carts, boss fights,
bikes-versus-helicopters, armoured baddies and explosive chuckables -
for the most part Katana Zero's laboratory of nastiness is built around a
few simple tools. You have a sword attack with a decent reach. You can
pick things up and throw them. You can jump. You can slow time. You can
dodge-roll. And beyond all that, there's the conceit that the game's
action is played out in your mind as you try and retry each encounter,
looping back through time with each failure and finding the best way to
tackle the groups of foes you encounter in this finely-calibrated 2D
world. When you finally make it to the end of one of the game's shortish
scenarios intact? Then you commit, and you get to watch a polished
playthrough of what you've just done - your solution to a bloody
temporal puzzle - played out on CCTV. Onwards!
There are elaborate justifications for all of this. An antihero
veteran navigating PTSD and addiction to a drug that allows them
precognition abilities, a grim throwback cyberpunk world of trashed lots
and ragged tenements. Creepy conversations with a therapist - they are a
therapist, right? - and sad nights alone in an apartment with cable
news unspooling the story of your latest atrocity and interesting
neighbors through the walls. Katana Zero has real narrative ambitions,
plenty of mysteries and dream sequences, and it's all enlivened by a
conversation system that allows you to interrupt, to obfuscate, to shut
people down as if chat itself was a rhythm action game. Nice as all this
stuff is, though, the game lives in doorways, just as Hotline Miami
did. You on one side of the door planning what to do with the people on
the other side. And then trying to do it, and then trying to do it
again. And again.
Variation never seems to weaken the appeal. Smoke canisters are
fun, as are stealth sections where you've switched the lights off and
slip past shadows, returning with a flamethrower. Boss fights are
surprisingly entertaining for a game in which most scraps are over in
nanoseconds. There's a lot of fun had with the themes for the various
locations you work through, yet the whole thing retains the immediacy of
a game built around very simple, and brutish, delights. How do you want
to tackle the next five seconds? Well that went badly. How do you want
to tackle it knowing what you know now? How do you want to ace it?
It's the almost invisible details that make it sing. The lovingly
crafted way that bodies collapse to the ground, the weirdly brilliant
Chopin pastiche in the therapist's room, the puff of flames as a molotov
hits a chain of barrels, the shake of a police van coming to a halt.
More than anything I love the process of opening doors. It took me an
age to work out how the game actually handles it. There didn't seem to
be a button press involved, it was almost like the game was responding
to my impulse as I waited for patrols on the other side to synchronise
with my own horrible schedule.
That's the trick really. When you have the ability to loop back as
you work your way forward, the whole thing becomes scheduling. Turn
here, strike here, jump here, Molotov. One, two, three. Dog barks.
Five...
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