We’ve seen these kinds of dialogue mechanics in BioWare RPGs and the like, though rarely in a comparable action game.
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“The ability to interrupt people as they speak is both a skip feature and a full game mechanic,” Stander says, “as interrupting someone’s dialogue can sometimes open unique paths in a conversation - though usually it’ll just annoy them until they don’t want to talk to you anymore.” The plot progression is satisfyingly unpredictable, and its time-sensitive dialogue choices - where players can often interrupt another character or choose their own contrasting responses to derail conversations - makes command of the narrative wonderfully central to the Katana ZERO experience. Bookending the action, this room becomes a locus for a robust yarn involving government conspiracy, nefarious military experiments, PTSD, time-stream shenanigans, and warring criminal assassins pushing the main character onward towards his “baleful end.” The pre-release “Therapy Session” trailer reveals our hero seated for his appointment in an elegant therapist’s office. It feels built for players who love to strap on a pair of headphones and die a lot, nodding their heads the whole way.īeyond the eye and ear candy, Stander’s game features a complex and thoughtful narrative.
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The pumping soundtrack features the return of collaborator Bill Kiley, a musician who previously worked on Stander’s free flash game Pause Ahead, while Dutch electronic artist Ludowic fills out the rest of the thumping murder-mill bass-heavy jams. The ferocious “neon-noir” quality is present, but the pixel art is more painstakingly dense and detailed, full of dramatic lighting, environmental effects, and carefully shaded backgrounds ready for ruin by arterial blood.
Dodging bullets, returning them to sender with a slash, and tumbling through hostile territory feels empowering during slow-mo, which also coats the world in a pulsing hallucinogenic hue.Īesthetically, Katana ZERO makes for blissful fare for Hotline diehards, though the design and fidelity of the game approaches refinement in a decidedly different way than Dennaton’s nauseatingly gorgeous duology. This results in plenty of deaths, and Katana ZERO leverages a quick restart option for its combat encounters - in addition to a time-slowing ability that is all but required for its toughest sequences. The game would begin with the main character tied to a chair, surrounded by armed guards - and the player would have to figure out and execute a plan to kill everyone and emerge unscathed.” More than six years later, the game’s preview build peaks at this exact chair-bound scenario, which finds the player incapacitated and staring down their impending death, before knocking over their chair to escape the room. “ Katana ZERO started as a short game idea I had in 2013. It would be a few years until Stander began putting together Katana ZERO, which is his largest project to date. Utilizing a Game Boy color palette for a highly challenging platformer whose cumulative rules became more restrictive, level by level, Tower of Heaven hit Newgrounds soon after release and slotted in nicely besides other brutal, bite-sized, buzz-saw-filled games of its ilk. That game was an early Flash project, and likely where many players first encountered Stander’s work.
We both have an aesthetic inspired by the 80s synthwave, neon-soaked violence of 2011’s Drive, and we both have frenetic, instant kill mechanics,” adding that for him, that “die and try again” mentality is just an extension of the punishing instant-death level design he’s been using since 2009’s Tower of Heaven. Let’s get it out of the way: the comparisons to Hotline Miami - a watershed game where insta-kill hyper-violence rules the day - feel inescapable, though Stander sees it more as a matter of shared DNA: “…surprisingly, it wasn’t a direct inspiration. I spoke to Stander ahead of the game’s release later this month about the development process, narrative, and John Wick. Katana ZERO, the stylish new cyberpunk action game from Justin Stander and Askiisoft by way of Devolver Digital marks a few familiar check-boxes like one-hit-kills, darkly atmospheric club tunes, and buckets of blood, but mixes in novel storytelling methods and an impressive amount of polish. Get in, do the job, get out - and maybe die a few dozen times.