Ninja Issen (忍者一閃)

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that one person builds with obvious love and no safety net, and Ninja Issen lands squarely in that category. ASTEROID-J, a solo Korean developer, took home Best Indie Game at the 2022 Made with Unity Korea awards before the game even launched, and playing it you can feel why someone handed it a trophy. The pixel art neon streets have atmosphere to spare, and the soundtrack carries that moody, machine-hum tension that good cyberpunk needs. It is a short ride, but it is a ride with personality. At its core this is a 2D side-scrolling action platformer cut from the same cloth as the 8-bit and 16-bit ninja games of the late eighties and early nineties. You play as Kiba, a rogue ninja framed for the assassination of his clan's grand master, thrown into a future metropolis crawling with enemy types. The combat toolkit is compact but satisfying: a katana for close-quarters slashing, shurikens that double as projectile deflectors, and a teleportation move that lets you throw your katana and flash-step toward it, which opens up both traversal and aggressive repositioning in ways that feel genuinely clever. Boss fights escalate through distinct phases, with some bosses changing attack patterns when you destroy specific parts, which gives each encounter a small puzzle-box quality alongside the reflex test. The problems are real and worth naming honestly. The runtime sits around three hours, which is fine for the asking price but feels tight when the level design occasionally clutters the screen rather than building clean challenge. Enemy bullets can be difficult to read against the busy neon backgrounds, a legibility issue that community players flagged early and that the developer was responsive about. There are also reports of minor hitbox inconsistencies on certain boss encounters, and a scrolling micro-stutter that the Steam community traced to a Unity camera issue. None of it is catastrophic, but the game would benefit from one more pass of polish. What carries it is the handcraft. The flash-step action has flair that punches above the budget. The cyberpunk-meets-ninja aesthetic, neon lights and robot enemies sharing space with traditional clan politics, is genuinely interesting and not something you see executed this way very often. For players who grew up with Ninja Gaiden on the NES, or who simply appreciate a small, intentional action game that knows its own identity, Ninja Issen offers a concentrated burst of exactly that thing. Go in expecting an afternoon, not a weekend, and it delivers.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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