Chess Knights: Shinobi

My spreadsheet instincts lit up the moment I understood the core rule: you control a shinobi who moves exclusively in the L-shaped pattern of a chess knight, and every enemy on the board obeys standard chess movement too. Rooks sweep entire rows, bishops own diagonals, and you cannot attack anyone directly. That single constraint - chess-legal movement for every piece on both sides - is doing all the heavy lifting, and for a budget puzzler it is a legitimately clean design foundation. The structure is fifty hand-crafted levels set in Edo-period Japan, with ten additional secret stages hidden inside the regular ones. The first ten levels double as a tutorial, introducing mechanics like tile-teleporters that instantly swap your knight to a matching symbol elsewhere on the board, and concealment bushes that hide you from enemy sight lines. Those additions are meaningful; the teleporters in particular flip late-game puzzles from "move avoidance" into genuine positional calculation, because you have to think several hops ahead about where you will land after the warp. When you also control more than one knight and must decide which piece to sacrifice to clear an enemy path, the decision space gets genuinely interesting for a game in this price bracket. Difficulty ramps faster than the visuals suggest it will. Critics noted the puzzles escalate from approachable to fiendishly hard in a compressed window, and players who expect a gentle Sunday afternoon experience will hit a wall mid-campaign. The problem is that the undo system is extremely limited - effectively forcing a full restart when you blunder late in a long run. For a pure-logic puzzle game, that is a meaningful quality-of-life miss. There are also reported control quirks on controller: rotating the camera decouples the movement cursor from the stick direction, which means you constantly need to snap back to the default angle before committing a move. It is not a dealbreaker, but it is the kind of rough edge that a small studio should have patched by now. On Steam the game sits at a "Very Positive" rating across its user base, which tracks with what reviewers across platforms found: a good core concept, pleasant Edo-era visual presentation with unobtrusive music, and well-designed stages that reward careful thought. The closest comparison floating around coverage is Hitman Go - that grid-based stealth-puzzle format where reading the full board before moving is the entire game. If that clicks for you, Shinobi delivers it with a chess ruleset that keeps the logic clean and consistent. No mod ecosystem, no AI opponent, no multiplayer - this is a purely solo, heads-down logic exercise. Chess knowledge helps you read enemy movement patterns faster, but it is not required to finish the game.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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