Oniken: Unstoppable Edition

Oniken: Unstoppable Edition is a side-scrolling action platformer built to feel like it was pulled straight off a 1980s cartridge. Developer JoyMasher, a tiny Brazilian studio, built this thing with the kind of obsessive fidelity that only comes from people who grew up losing sleep over Ninja Gaiden and Contra. You play as Zaku, a mercenary working with a rebel faction against the Oniken military organization, which has seized control in the aftermath of a war that nearly wiped out humanity. The setup is minimal and intentional. This is not a story-heavy game. It is a game about getting to the end of a stage without throwing your keyboard. The structure is classic: six missions, each split into segments, each ending in a boss fight. Zaku has a sword, grenades, and a brief berserker mode triggered by collecting power items. That is your entire toolkit, and the game designs around it with real precision. Enemies have patterns. Platforms punish careless jumps. Bosses require you to read telegraphs and stay disciplined. The difficulty sits somewhere between genuinely hard and outright mean, and the checkpoint system leans toward the latter. Expect to replay sections many times, not because the design is unfair, but because it demands execution. What JoyMasher gets exactly right is the aesthetic cohesion. The pixel art is not retro-flavored, it is retro-committed. Scanlines, limited color palettes, chunky sprites, screen flash on hits, the whole thing. The soundtrack follows the same logic, delivering crunchy chiptune compositions that nail the frantic energy of the action without ever feeling like parody. This is the rare case where a modern developer clearly understood the hardware constraints of the era they are referencing and chose those constraints as a creative frame rather than a costume. There is a difference, and Oniken lands on the right side of it. Where the game falls short is largely a function of its ambition versus its length. Six missions sounds modest, and it is. Players comfortable with this genre may finish in two to four hours on their first run, less on revisits. The Unstoppable Edition adds extra missions and a second playable character, which extends things meaningfully, but the core game still feels like a proof of concept that JoyMasher later expanded on (with good reason) in their follow-up work. Some will see this as tight and focused. Others will feel slightly shortchanged, especially if the difficulty causes them to grind through the harder segments repeatedly without a sense of growing narrative reward. The story never evolves beyond its premise, and that is a real constraint if you come in hoping for something with emotional weight. For a specific kind of player, though, Oniken is exactly what it promises. If you have nostalgia for NES action platformers or genuine respect for the craft of that era, JoyMasher demonstrates here that they understand the language fluently. The controls are responsive, the hit detection is honest, and the game never tries to be something it is not. That last quality is rarer than it sounds.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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