Ninjas are cool! Well, the modern pop cultural interpretation of ninjas is cool. Real ninjas were more like covert spies, sneaking around dressed like everyday people, poisoning their enemies, assassinating rivals, and so on. No fancy Ryu Hayabusa outfits or anything. But modern ninjas are cool with the swords and the funky moves and the dark outfits! In short, ninjas good, ninja video games, largely good. And well-made ninja games that are challenging, definitely good.
Since Team Ninja reinvented the Ninja Gaiden series, there has been a bit of a resurgence in ninja games (not that they really went away). But often, the mechanics leave something to be desired or the overall design work isn’t the best. The actual games are often unfortunately intermittent, even if we do occasionally get excellent titles like The Messenger. Once in a while though, a ninja game comes along that truly impresses and that game is Within the Blade from developer Ametist Studio and publisher Ratalaika Games! In fact, speaking of Team Ninja, this is the game you’d expect if Team Ninja decided to make a pixel art ninja game! Yeah, it’s that wild.
Within the Blade puts you in the stealthy shoes of the ninja Hideaki of the Black Lotus clan. Demons are out to destroy the shogunate and Hideaki is the last line of defense against them. It’s not exactly an original premise, but the focus is definitely on gameplay over plot here. As Hideaki, you set out to turn the demons back and defeat the enemies of the shogun!
What you’ll find very quickly in Within the Blade is that the game is fast. Blistering fast in fact, by both ninja game standards and side scrolling platformers as well. This is a pixel art game, so initial impressions might be a bit underwhelming…until you move. Hideaki moves like greased lightning, flying from tree to tree with ease, flipping over enemies, diving headlong into grasses to hide, and striking from the shadows. You know, like a ninja. He’s actually so fast that it takes some time to get a feel for the controls of Within the Blade and you’re likely to suffer a few deaths while learning the mechanics. As a ninja, you can climb walls and jump up onto platforms from the sides, throwing yourself at enemies. But physics are a two-way street. Strike too close to an edge and your follow-through carries you over it. Sometimes that means falling directly onto a bed of spikes and dying a painful death. Other times, you plummet into a group of enemies you’re ill-prepared for. The auto-jump function when you climb up walls takes some getting used to too. Once you do however, Hideaki is an absolute joy to control, flitting quietly across the screen with ease and grace.
There’s a lot more to talk about for the gameplay of Within the Blade however. In addition to your fine control, the combat is absolutely phenomenal here. Let’s start with swords. You begin with a katana, slicing and dicing up enemies left and right. But you can also block with it, and you’ll definitely need to, as there are samurai to fight and there’s no way they’re going to let themselves be cut down! You actually duel with them and have to find openings in their defenses, something almost unheard of for this kind of game. There are a variety of enemies with varying attacks that you have to prepare for or dodge and learning how to approach each is important. However, your sword can break. As you use it, it becomes weaker and its blue bar slowly drops to zero, leaving you with only your hands. Fortunately, you’re a ninja and you can fight hand to hand as well. Unfortunately, you can’t assassinate anyone with your bare hands for some reason.
Yes, assassinate! The key component of ninjas is that they’re assassins, right? Well, Within the Blade makes that absolutely and unequivocally spectacular! By holding down the X button and running into an enemy from behind, Hideaki assassinates them with a variety of incredibly graphic animations including throat slitting, repeated stabbings, and even full decapitation with blood splattering across the walls! It’s absolutely vicious and spectacular. In fact, when using a katana, you can even slice arms and legs off of your pixel opponents! It’s a sight to behold and Within the Blade is easily one of the most casually violent pixel art games ever, with enemies constantly being crushed to bloody pulps, diced apart, and even blown to gory bits.
But there isn’t just violence either. As a ninja, your key skill is stealth. Hideaki can hide in the shadows like a true ninja, vanishing into the dark or tall grasses. There are a variety of items you can acquire throughout the game that allow you to poison enemies from a distance, put them to sleep, or blind them with flashes of light so you can dash up and attack. There’s even a kusarigama, a sort of mace with a hook attached to one end that allows you to grab enemies, pull them to you and eviscerate them! The sheer variety of inventiveness that Within the Blade allows for in completing levels is a sheer joy and there’s a ton of replay value here, especially if you’re trying to complete every sub-goal. Do not be seen is particularly challenging and chances are high that in your first playthrough, you will fail at this frequently. Don’t worry, you can still complete the levels if you survive!
Speaking of survival, if you manage to make it through a level or two, you’ll return to the Black Lotus village and talk to your sensei. He’s probably the most casual, Western-speaking sensei to ever grace feudal Japan, but hey, beggars can’t be translators. In point of fact, the dialogue in Within the Blade is overall quite terrible and doesn’t suit the time period, but you get used to it. Think ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us” mixed with “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and you’ll be fine. Anyway, each time you visit your sensei after a level, you gain attribute points allowing you to unlock ninja skills. Some of these improve weapon or bare-handed combat, others raise health or add new moves to your repertoire. The sheer number of skill upgrades available is quite impressive and they have a drastic impact on gameplay. It is highly recommended you unlock blacksmithing level 2 by the end of the second level though, as chances are you’re going to need to make yourself a new katana by then. If you’re playing through Within the Blade and wondering where all this wondrous crafting gear is, you don’t really start acquiring a lot of items until area 2 when you start infiltrating bases and breaking open all the containers and treasure chests lying around in them, so be patient!
As you move forward, the game becomes more complex and you’ll be infiltrating enemy bases, sneaking through and rescuing captives, as well as fighting some rather vicious bosses. You’ll need to master every move you can too, because some of these guys are fast and challenging. The first stage final boss was notably challenging, giving very little leeway for mistakes, even once you learn his patterns. It’s hard to say whether levels or bosses are more fun, as each has its merits in Within the Blade. The variety of challenge and the level design means that while you’re still working hard to beat each level, they aren’t dragging on either and there’s a feeling of steady progression.
As you can see, there’s a lot going on here with the combat, upgrades, crafting mechanics, boss fights, and overall story. The entire game is presented in pixel art form, with a handful of pixel art cinemas here and there to really add some punch. While the character art for Hideaki isn’t incredibly fancy, the game is so fast you barely notice and the overall impact, especially with any kind of blood or explosions, is very impressive. The game looks simple visually, but it looks simple in a good way. Character designs are excellent and the bosses are quite creative, with unexpected designs and attacks. The sound is suitably Eastern and the sound effects are glorious, especially when covertly eviscerating your enemies. This is simply a beautiful game.
However, for all its outstanding qualities, there are a few significant issues with Within the Blade. Some of them are absolutely patchable and a few are just weird. Let’s look at the most obvious one first, the level presentation. When moving through a level, you might notice that there’s an awful lot of dead space on the bottom half of the screen. For some reason, the devs thought it would be a good idea to keep the ground at around the middle of the screen without putting any sprites below it. This means that half the screen is often simply black while you’re playing around half of the time and it just looks terrible. There’s no reason not to move the camera up to give an expansive sense of size to the levels, and yet they feel compressed and enclosed, even though you can jup up through trees in many places. Perhaps this is to hide the alternate pathways, but it just ends up looking odd.
Then there’s the inventory and crafting screens. When you go back to the village you can craft new weapons, items, and poisons, but there’s no highlight on your selections and the mechanics of the crafting screen are never explained. You just have to figure it out. This gets even worse on the inventory screen because not only are none of the items in your inventory highlighted when you go to select them, but the button legend at the bottom isn’t even accurate, so you simply have to kind of guess where your cursor is and hope you manage to select what you want through trial and error. This is some lazy menu design, and it’s honestly the worst part of Within the Blade, especially if you want to take full advantage of the variety of attack options available to you through various items. Then there’s the save system. Saving is inconsistent in Within the Blade, and while save points work in levels, they’re single use affairs and if you get some great items out of a random chest and then die, you’ll lose them. You can’t get back to the save point since it’s spent and you’ll die a lot, so don’t get attached to the stuff you find! If you save in the town after crafting and leave the game before you start a new level, you lose your crafted items and spoils from the previous level as well. All in all, while saves do work, the execution is lacking.
On top of all these options and a handful of weird issues, each time you beat a level, Within the Blade calculates your score. If you get seen, it’s a huge score penalty, multiplied by the number of times you get seen. It also looks at how many times you remained unseen, how many hits you’ve taken, how many kills you’ve gotten, and how many times you’ve retried the level. Expect your score and experience to be zero as often as not, because mastering Within the Blade takes actual work. This is an easy to learn, hard to master title that really compels you to try harder to disappear into the shadows, sneak up, and defeat your foes. It’s rare that a ninja game really hits that sweet spot where you are sitting on the edge of the couch trying to do incrementally better each time until you master it, but that is absolutely the case here.
Within the Blade is an absolutely outstanding ninja game that rewards diligence, patience, and skill. For an $11 title, this is an absolute steal. It is rare that a small digital release comes along which manages to be this violent, exciting, and complex for a bargain basement price. And Within the Blade is simply fun. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, and it has a few things that could definitely use a bit of fixing, but the game is damned good fun and worth every penny you spend on it. In fact, it’s so good that it probably deserves a Switch physical release. Cross your fingers! Ametist is a studio to watch with this release and you will absolutely get your ninja on here! Now go disembowel your enemies!
This review was based on a digital copy of Within the Blade provided by the publisher. It was played on an Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was excellent in both. A Switch Pro Controller was used in docked mode. Within the Blade is also available on PS4/PS5, Xbox One/ Xbox Series X, and PC on Steam! Pictures are of actual gameplay!
