Stop-motion animation is one of those art forms that will always amaze me. The moment a new stop-motion animated film is announced (something that happens too infrequently if you ask me), I’m in; I don’t even need to know much more. What I didn’t expect was a stop-motion video game, but The Spirit of the Samurai, a 2D action adventure from developer Digital Mind Games and publisher Kwalee, is here.
Though I have to put a pretty big asterisk onto this idea of a stop-motion video game that The Spirit of the Samurai is marketed as. Because as far as I can tell, The Spirit of the Samurai is not actually utilizing anything resembling classic stop-motion animation techniques. It simply attempts to simulate the look of stop-motion in its animation, to varying degrees of success. The biggest problem here is that even though the slightly stuttering movement is fairly accurate, the digital models that do them completely go against the classic handmade feeling you usually get from stop-motion animation, which creates a weird dichotomy. This gets even worse during cutscenes, which are pre-rendered, fully CGI scenes that don’t even attempt to simulate any sort of stop-motion look anymore. So, while The Spirit of the Samurai does have a unique look, it won’t exactly scratch that stop-motion itch, and even more than that, it just looks off due to the mix of that style and the digital models.
Moving on to the story, in The Spirit of the Samurai you play as a samurai (and a cat and a kodama, but we’ll get to that in a bit), whose village is being attacked by fallen warriors that have come back to life alongside Japanese monsters, and it’s on you to stop them. The overall story is pretty cool, if not entirely original, but there’s a nice grimdark fantasy vibe throughout the whole thing. But the writing of the dialogue is super rough and honestly shouldn’t get past a first draft. “This is where we meet. Yes, in my dreams. But… this is no dream. Ok. Here goes.” And the voice acting doesn’t help this either. For some reason, while most of the cast has Japanese accents, that’s not necessarily true for everyone. The main Samurai, Takeshi, for example, occasionally drops into a Japanese accent for specific words but sounds a lot more British for most of his dialogue. Inconsistency is one of this game’s biggest issues across the board.
The structure of The Spirit of the Samurai also leads to some serious pacing issues. When your village gets attacked and it’s time to fight and protect it, you first have to run to the lookout on the opposite side of the village so you can watch a two-second cutscene of the army invading before running back to the other side of the village to actually fight. You had to visit the same lookout just a few minutes earlier to get a three-second cutscene of the area looking peaceful, by the way. These forced extra trips and very clear order in which you need to do things so badly hurt the flow of this game. I understand that it’s a linear action adventure, but being unable to find items until you have spoken with the people that require them leads to annoying extra trips and frustration when searching for them since you might have already looted those spots; you were just too early.
While there is some platforming that feels mostly mediocre, in part due to the simulated stuttering of the stop-motion style animation and in part because the camera placement and level design just don’t communicate where you need to jump, the core of the gameplay is the combat. At first I really hated it. The Spirit of the Samurai attempts to add depth by allowing you to bind different attacks and combos to every direction of your right joystick, but this only needlessly overcomplicates things, and you’re able to get through the game without too much issue by just mashing the regular attack combo on your square button. Once I made this realization, I started to enjoy The Spirit of the Samurai a lot more, playing it essentially like a hack and slash. All of this is referring to the Samurai, of course, but as mentioned before, you also play as a cat and a kodama at parts. The kodama (imagine a little spirit guy from a Ghibli film) plays very similarly to the samurai, with some slight differences in how their attacks work and an extra energy resource. While the cat turns The Spirit of the Samurai into a stealth game, unfortunately a rather buggy one. There seem to be problems with the cat and the hitboxes of certain environmental elements that you need to jump on that forced me to manually restart from the last checkpoint multiple times.
But let me end this review on a positive note, because despite how negative I’ve been so far, I didn’t hate The Spirit of the Samurai. And what carried it for me is actually the look of it. I know I mentioned at the beginning that the stop-motion style doesn’t entirely work—and I stand by that. I think the game would honestly be better if it went with a more traditional style of animation—the visuals are still very strong. The environments have so much atmosphere, whether it’s a glowing spirit realm, an all-enveloping fog that only lanterns and silhouettes pierce through, or the burning remains of a destroyed village. It has such a cohesive and oppressive grimdark fantasy look infused with the Japanese mythology. The creatures look nasty and, unlike other parts of the game, really benefit from the uncanny stop-motion effect.
The Spirit of the Samurai is a very flawed game, but for whatever reason, despite having many issues with individual components of the game, when everything comes together as one package, it somehow almost overcomes some of that. Never to the degree that I would call it a great game (it just has too many issues that bothered me), but there’s a charm here. Maybe it’s just that for a small indie developer this is a pretty ambitious game, and that’s hard not to respect in parts, even if the execution falls flat on its face.
Nairon played The Spirit of the Samurai on PC with a review code.
