I have to review this game before I move on because it is important that it gets any little bit of attention that it can. Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a special game. Fuck the buzz words, giving it a score and me trying to convince you that this game is possibly the best thing that came out last year. You just need to trust that you need to play this or at least give it a good look to see if it is for you.

Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a remake of a NES game from 1990 but it has those original developers from back then returning. It is the type of video game redo I want to see unlike recent releases such as Resident Evil 4 (2023) and probably Silent Hill 2 (2024) but I haven’t played that one yet. Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is like when you watch a martial arts movie and the old master finally demonstrates his skills and shows the students how it is really done. I’m not qualified to write about this game. From what I have learned about Shadow of the Ninja Reborn, and from my experience with it, the developers of this game have been playing and making games since before I was born and they really, really know what they’re doing. That’s not going to stop me from writing about it though and it sure as hell didn’t stop a bunch of others that shouldn’t have.

Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a beautiful game and not just in its visuals and music. Although this is a stunning looking game, seriously go check out some gameplay footage. The beauty is in the movement, the precision, the design, the rules and the demand for commitment. Shadow of the Ninja Reborn feels fantastic. The jump and its arc, the control over it, the feeling of weight and the little spin for more distance is perfection. Running up walls and the shadow step, the attacks and how they damage and how position matters is all so good. The level and enemy design is in harmony with it all. This is butter melting into warm toast. I love it when something plays this great and is this well made. Everything is mine, every bit of progress and every bit of damage taken. Getting through a long section, I once found tricky, completely unscathed made me feel like an action platforming god. Messing up, which happened too often, made me feel like a Neanderthal clumsily bashing on a controller. It is a perfect example of tough but fair.

Playing through and learning Shadow of the Ninja Reborn was a pleasure. I started off just working my way through the game to the end while getting my arse kicked. Doing this was just the beginning. Once that was done I used the time trial mode to practise the stages a bit before eventually getting the no continue run on normal. One thing that Shadow of the Ninja Reborn does is that the score you achieve on a run becomes your prep money for your following runs. This allows you to buy Ninja gear to start your next run with. This progression feels like an olive branch to players that might not have stuck with it longer. On top of this if you die a bunch of times just trying to beat it you will get a health item. Older games can often be like ‘fuck you, get good, try again’ while Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is like ‘have another go and with this you might get a little further.’ Of course you can ignore prep money for the pure experience and there is a trophy for getting a no continue run this way.

After normal it was onto hard. After a bit time, effort and learning I got the hard no continue run and 80,000+ score. It was such an engrossing and satisfying journey. On top of that, while playing through over and over I found the soundtrack just kept growing on me more and more. I feel ready to move on now but Shadow of the Ninja Reborn still has more left in the tank for when I return. I could go for the no continue + no buying ninja gear run, I could play for score, I haven’t found all of the ninja gear yet and I could play against the clock in time trials. There are leader boards for times and scores too and Shadow of the Ninja Reborn can be played in co op as well.

Now to criticise this game, which I already admitted to be not qualified to do but here we go anyway. The stage 5 boss is weirdly tall when you take everything else in the game into account but I feel like there is an explanation there. He has a hawk with a large wingspan and this game is widescreen. So I’m guessing it is something to do with screen space and not making him look too wide and in correct proportion with the bird as well. His second stage is also easier than the first which underwhelms a bit. Overall I’d say that if this game has room for improvement it is the bosses even with them being as fun as they are. On difficulty, Shadow of the Ninja Reborn doesn’t have a steady incline in challenge starting from easy and climbing harder and harder. I found the difficulty to flatten through the middle and then spike right at the end. Maybe that is to the taste of some or this could be unique to me too. I lost a bunch of runs right at the end multiple times. So maybe I just crumbled under the weight of the whole run or maybe I’m salty and need to get good. I think stage 4 could have been a little more challenging and that I needed more preparation from the game for the end of stage 6. Also, the section where you are dodging explosive traps and blasts coming out the walls felt less interesting to me. Instead of just time trials for practise it would have been great to get a mode that breaks the game down into smaller pieces too, so you could go in and repeat areas you needed to work on.

Honestly I am just nitpicking here. The real tragedy of Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is how extremely lacking the coverage of this game was. Then some coverage of the game that did happen just really sucks. The whole thing is a bit sad. You have to look very hard to find anyone talking about it in game of the year discussions and end of year wrap ups. All this frustration wasn’t limited to critics, there are plenty of user reviews too, but god damn there are some ‘professional’ reviews that just... This isn’t a matter of taste. It is incompetence, a lack of understanding and being incorrect. To be fair I’m not perfect either, I don’t have the education and terminology to go into the fine details of its design and pixel art. I have also been sleeping on Tengo Project and now I have to fix that and get to their other releases. At least I didn’t refuse to adapt to the game, complain about the challenge, blame the controls and claim it has lag. Then give it a low score that will harm its sales and reputation and the possibility that Tengo gets to keep doing what they do.

Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a passion project from veterans. This wasn’t made to be super profitable or maybe even very profitable at all. It is surprising that it exists and I’m so glad it does. The poor coverage and serious lack of coverage sadly does not surprise me and I wish things were different. Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a dance partner that always holds up its side of that relationship. Once you start to learn the dance too it is art. It is just a really fucking good video game.