Onikira - Demon Killer

My first few hours with Onikira had me genuinely charmed. Irish indie Digital Furnace Games built something that has no business looking this good for a small studio: hand-painted backdrops of rain-drenched villages, burning opulent cities, mountaintop shrines, and an erupting volcano scroll past as you carve through waves of demons, and the visual atmosphere feels less like pixel work and more like a scroll painting that someone set on fire in the best possible way. That aesthetic alone carries real weight, and it held my attention through the early levels like a steady drumbeat. The combat is where Onikira stakes its biggest claims and largely delivers. You play as Yamazaki Jiro, a lone samurai with four weapons at his disposal: the katana for fast ground pressure, the tetsubo for heavy swings, the naginata for air-based crowd control, and arm blades that keep you mobile. Each weapon carries its own unlockable moves, and the system rewards you for weaving between them mid-combo. Launch an enemy skyward with the katana, wall-jump above them, then slam them back down. Switch to the naginata, use the Naginata Lift to keep yourself airborne on crumbling platforms while pulling enemies up to meet you. The grappling hook adds a traversal layer that bleeds naturally into combat across chasms and fiery pits. A style counter tracks how long you avoid being hit, and a single blow collapses your rank instantly, which gives the scoring system a genuinely tense edge. There are over forty moves across those four weapons, challenge arenas tied to online leaderboards, and a Soul Shop where collected souls are traded to spirits for new abilities inside each level. Enemy types are designed with specific vulnerabilities to push you away from button-mashing: a floating possessed Mempo mask rewards air game, while a corrupted high-ranking samurai punishes aggression and rewards hit-and-run patience. The environmental tools are a quiet delight, too. Slicing support pillars to collapse buildings onto groups of enemies never gets old, and the game clearly understands that the arena itself is a weapon. The problems are real and worth naming. Technical performance at launch was rough across multiple reviewers: frame drops mid-combo, stage-start stuttering, and at least one boss encounter with a broken camera letterbox that hid both the HUD and the boss health bar during the final fight. The story is thin, told entirely through text with no voice work, and for some players that will feel like a missed opportunity given the rich mythology the game draws from. The campaign spans seven areas with two mini-bosses and two mega-bosses, which means this is a compact experience, and the back half shows signs of the campaign losing momentum before it closes. Keyboard and mouse players have reported that on-screen prompts are tuned for a controller, making a gamepad essentially required for a comfortable run. For the audience that fits, though, this is a specific and handmade thing. If you came up on Devil May Cry style meters, early Ninja Gaiden, or the 2D action cadence of Shinobi, Onikira will read as familiar in the best sense. Its ambition outpaces its polish in spots, but the combat foundation is solid enough that a few hours inside it still lands. The soundtrack captures the quickness of the movement with an upbeat energy that suits the pace, even if it occasionally resets on death in a way that breaks the spell. Approach this one with a controller, tempered expectations on the story side, and genuine appreciation for what a small team built from scratch.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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