EPTI thought I'd finish the year with some fan art, for a game I played recently and really enjoy, Mark of the Ninja, so I recorded the process of painting it.
Mark of The Ninja is a platform game by Klei Entertainment that adds stealth gameplay to the usual running and jumping action. The player takes the role of a ninja tasked by his master with killing a businessman. This mission leads from Japanese encampments to modern high-rises, with a huge variety of stealthy methods to reach your goal. The plot keeps things moving; it explains your acutely observant ability to know the range of sounds, and other 'ninja' powers, and keeps you moving from one place to the next. While it pushes the action forward, it leads down a mostly predictable path. It really feels like some time was wasted trying to add depth to the story that doesn't show, while the depth of gameplay is more than enough to keep you coming back for more.
Stalking your way through these levels is no easy task. Each level features a well-guarded stronghold, teeming with alert guards, motion sensors, lasers and noxious gas. The game focuses on sound and vision; you are shown with rippling circles how much enemy-attracting noise actions make, and areas you are blurred if they aren't directly visible. While every stealth-based game runs the risk of making your enemies look incompetent Mark of the Ninja works well, there are situations where you will be legitimately challenged by merely coming across a well-lit room with a guard facing the door. Here enemies might have minds like goldfish when it comes to being alerted, but they also have body armour, guns and dogs, making them much stronger than you, able to nearly kill you on sight.
If you want to kill them you'll have to sneak up to them and stealth-kill them, otherwise, in a head-on fight, all you have are your fists, which the game puts down to it being a ceremonial sword. These kills are simple quick-time events, the cost of failure is that the guard screams as he dies, possibly alerting others. Your natural agility compared to your foes allows you to survive, and while there can be multiple paths through a level it never feels like it's due to a deeply flawed security system, more a cunning ability to sneak, grapple and hide past danger.
Of course a ninja isn't a ninja without a bag of tricks, and Mark of the Ninja offers a slowly-unlocking arsenal of equipment to make your job easier. Early on you are given darts, which can't hurt guards but prove useful catching their attention, breaking lights or destroying power boxes from a distance. As the game progresses you get items to distract guards, such as noise makers and items to hurt, like spike traps. These all have their unique uses, terror darts for example can silently panic a guard as much as if he'd just seen his friend's corpse thrown out from the shadows, causing him to shoot wildly. You gain other abilities too, from the tattoos you receive in the excellently animated cutscenes, including a sort of supernatural infrared to improve vision. All in all you feel like a glass cannon; stealth makes you very powerful but if you're caught you are very easy to kill.
Klei previously worked on the Shank games, both plaformers that featured a much more action-oriented play style, but their artistic fingerprints are visible in both. The Samurai Jack like art style is clearly recognisable as their own,and in Mark of the Ninja it's taken further, with design that fits the gameplay. Hide in the shadows and you become a line-drawing, white on black with only the red of your supernatural tattoos showing. In the light you are suddenly visible in full colour, a subtle difference that really alerts you to how exposed you are, enemies can see you from much further away and will investigate.
The end result is a game that feels measured and methodical. You can sprint, but that makes a lot of noise, so you stalk silently, dropping from the ceiling to kill one guard, hiding his body in a doorway and grappling back onto the ceiling before his friend turns around.
It took me about 4 hours to complete the game, but with scrolls, challenges and awards for getting through levels with no alerts and no kills there is plenty to come back to. Each level contains three hidden scrolls that offer some cursory backstory, one of which is unlocked by finding and completing a secret challenge level, well-designed puzzles using the games mechanics in new ways. The challenges too are interesting, ranging from "complete a task undetected" to "terrify a guard by hanging another from a grapple point". These push you to explore different play styles, and unlock different costumes that further enhance these styles. sneak around enough and you'll get a suit that allows you to run silently but not carry a sword, so you can't kill directly, kill a lot and you'll get a suit that makes you stronger at the expense of distraction items.
There is a New Game Plus mode too, that offers a greater challenge, tweaking the gameplay for extra challenge, no visual clue to how far sounds travel for example. This really feels like the sort of gameplay depth Mark of The Ninja does well with.
