I snuck one more game from 2025 into my year-end (basically one of the only things I’ve really played since my accident) and I think it deserves a spot in the list of favourites. I mean how can you not love a game with a baby Shinobi?

I quite enjoyed the game, which continues a streak of successes by LizardCube, the French dev that frequently collaborates with DotEmu and works on Sega titles. Shinobi: Art of Vengence strikes me as the kind of action platformer that a lot of people who bounce off Silksong might be looking for, something with gorgeous hand drawn art, beautiful background work and solid platforming mixed with mildly challenging combat that feels very satisfying to master and lacks the Soulslike elements of something like Hollow Knight or Silksong. It’s very much an arcade action platformer, with great platforming control and combat that feels fast, precise and satisfying. It’s largely a no bullshit game, one that isn’t going to send you running back through corpse runs or endless gauntlets just to recover ground. Instead it’s a game that has very pleasant steady progress forward, one that doesn’t gate things like double jump behind late game upgrades and instead focuses most upgrades on expanding Joe Mushashi’s combat repertoire.

The game also has a full compliment of accessibility settings that lets the individual tweak for their personal preferences or needs. I played on the Shinobi setting, which is the game default, but there is a lot to play with to allow a person to reduce the difficulty from there should they hit a wall.

The game isn’t without its flaws, and most of them are met in some of the optional platforming segments where you discover that there are limits to LizardCube’s platforming design and mechanics. One in particular pertains to this puzzle:

This puzzle requires that you manipulate Joe from the top to the sides of the floating crate at multiple junctions. However LizardCube didn’t program a means to dismount the top of the cube to directly cling onto the side. Instead, you have to drop Joe off the side and catch the ledge. This is complicated by the fact that the game has an auto ledge mount, so if you grab the side too soon you will leap right back on top, usually into the danger zone of flames or spinning saws you were trying to avoid. It’s random enough that it’s easy to repeat the challenge multiple times because you’re fighting the system design rather than working through the puzzle. There are also some segments in puzzles like this where the timing to move from one edge of the cube to another is so slim, you really do need a more precise set of controls to pull it off. There are several secret areas like this that push the game’s platforming systems to their absolutely limit and it’s not hard to feel that LizardCube got a tad too ambitious in their platforming level design in a handful of sections that they didn’t tweak the mechanics enough to really match. It’s the only point where I think the game isn’t bullshit free, and the only point where I think that despite its difficulty, something like Silksong always feels fairer in its challenges.

Of course everyone wants to compare this to the other ninja platformer out this year, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound. I don’t know how productive that really is, because they are very different games and LizardCube’s specific specialty in platforming and combat makes for some that feels very far from a Soulslike/Metroidvania, which The Game Kitchen is 100% chasing that design language. It’s very obvious that Shinobi is arcade action focused because things like your combo meter only depletes upon taking a hit, which means you can rack immense combo scores and dish out bonus damage thanks to combo boosts you can equip. Ninja Gaiden has a combo meter that is time based so you need to keep moving and killing which allows them to play with the tension of risk and reward that is familiar in Soulslikes. But Ninja Gaiden also tempers your combo count because it’s not an arcade game, it’s not focuses on big numbers and high scores like Shinobi is, especially when you unlock the latter’s actual arcade mode that applies ranks to each level.

I’ve only just started Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound so I don’t have a lot to say except that it definitely feels slower, with a kettle bit less of a satisfying element of feedback during combat. Platforming also feels less fast and fluid and more meticulous and intentional, which makes sense for the style of game that they tend to design and tends to have weightier, Castlevania inspired, action to it. But I’ll stop there because, again, I don’t think there’s a lot of fruitful discussion to be had comparing them other than it excellent that both franchises have new 2D platforming games that take wholly different approaches to combat platforming design.