I should just get this out of the way: I've seen one classic samurai film - the original Seven Samurai - and it was so long ago that you could probably convince me that there were actually six samurai total. I recall enjoying it, and I'm broadly familiar with the genre through cultural osmosis. That having been said: I don't know the particulars. I don't know what Trek to Yomi gets right and wrong. I'll leave that to someone better versed in the films the game is inspired by.

Now, the review. Trek to Yomi, whatever it ultimately is, is neither of the things I wanted it to be. Is it good? Definitely. Great sense of style, the combat feels about right for samurai combat. Bold swings, standing your ground, fending off enemies on both sides. It's not driven by agility, by dodges. You wait, you strike, you parry. Well done, although I get the feeling that the difficulty was toned down. If enemies did just a bit more damage, if healing checkpoints were just a bit further apart, if you were punished just a little more often for mistakes then it would be - at least for me - pitch perfect with the theme. As it is, it feels like it was tuned down a bit for accessibility, but the game is short enough that a second run on hard mode is possible for the curious. Beyond that, it feels like a classic story, presents itself seriously and does so well. Hard to ask for much more there.

The problem is, I want Trek to Yomi to be either more game or more film.

More game. Color as highlights, a more dynamic world that feels less like setpieces. More engaging secrets, a greater variety of enemies, a more fantastic underworld. Or more film. A world built by practical effects, with none of the fantastic, impossible for the time set pieces of said underworld. Less of a need to break the narrative flow to look for secrets during dramatic moments. A more concise, film-like structure that feels less like levels and more like a story. Fewer fights with greater drama.

As it is, it straddles the line between film and game well, but not so well that I don't wish it was more one than the other.

Trek to Yomi really grabbed my attention as soon as it started. It's hyper-stylised and takes most of its inspiration from the late Kurosawa. Which it does perfectly, with the black and white grain look and the fixed camera showing beautiful shots. The environments are beautifully detailed. These things were also its downfall. The gameplay was massively neglected, it was tedious and, after awhile, I became an unstoppable force. Just by using one combo, it's so broken.

I would prefer if they kept mythological elements out and stuck to the hard reality of the 16th century. But this is just nitpicking. I gave up playing towards the end as I couldn't force myself to finish.

Got this on PS Plus, and went in with no knowledge on the game, and no specific expectations. And I was very pleasantly surprised. The game looks gorgeous, the combat is fast paced and smooth and the voice acting is great.
The game also has fantastic atmosphere. The burning villages and the swamp town in chapter 4 feel completely destroyed and the suffering people make you really feel for them. I love it, it gives you a sense of dread and unease, but without resorting to actual jumpscares.

That said, the game has its flaws. It doesn't have a chapter select for some reason, so if you missed a collectible without knowing. You have to replay the entire game to get them all. I get it is to motivate you to get all endings. But it feels more like artificial padding.

Still, the amazing environments and fun combat leaves you wanting more. Which is great, since I rather have a game be short. But fun all the way through, than it'd become a repetitive slog

TLDR: Trek to Yomi is an homage to olden samurai films. While it has great visuals and atmosphere the gameplay is a bit lacking. 6.7/10

(This review will be a spoiler free discussion of Trek to Yomi with only the basics of gameplay being discussed and some story elements that are available on the game's steam page)

Trek to Yomi is described as a love letter to classic Japanese cinema with the works of Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi being a particular inspiration.
At the time of review I have just completed my second playthrough with my first being on Normal (Bushido) and my second being on hard (Ronin). The game is made up of chapters which aren't overly long instead are relatively on the shorter side, the game overall will take around 5 hours to complete. The game does have multiple endings so there is some replay value and there are a decent amount of achievements (on steam).

The game's visuals are its strongest selling point and are initially what drew me to the game. The black and white cinematic style of the game is ripe with opportunities for screenshots, I only wish you could unsheathe your sword outside of combat for screenshots.

Story- Due to the spoiler free nature of this review I will not go into the story in depth but my experience with the game's story is that I liked it, I felt connected with Hiroki and at the end I was happy with the ending I had gotten. Alongside the story I will say the voice acting is great. I had played with the japanese voice acting to better immerse myself, there is an option for english voice acting but I cannot comment on it.

Gameplay wise Trek to Yomi is quite simplistic, there are 4 main segments of combat; Blocking, Parrying, Sword strikes and ranged combat. Additional segments are added into these main segments later on but these 4 are the core of the gameplay loop. As you progress through the game you can find and unlock new combos for sword strikes to shake up gameplay. While this is nice the in the latter third of the game the combat gets very repetitive and the story is the main reason you continue forward, even in my second playthrough I was continuing only to get the achievements. Parrying and Blocking are available onset but the further you go the better you are with it. Overall the gameplay while seemingly expansive is repetitive in its latter half and not anything to sing about.

Trek to Yomi is a game you play because of the visual style voice acting and the story, the gameplay is just the means to facilitate those and is a means to an end. While I did like the story and voice acting I cannot give it a 7/10 with how the gameplay is and becomes so I will give the game a 6.7/10.

I like it when a game prioritizes and values its style above its other aspects, but that only works when it conveys something, when it serves a purpose based on the fact that it is a game

Trek to Yomi is not like that. It is a clear example of “style over substance”, but its style just doesn’t mean anything. Instead, when you try to interact with the world it presents it just rings hollow.

In the end, basically every facet of what makes this game a game feels lacking. And I don’t mean only the lackluster combat gameplay or all the action aspects it has, but actually the interactiveness with its world as a whole just never feels alive.

I must say, though, that I really do enjoy its artstyle, even if it doesn’t have enough substance supporting it, and I could find some fun in its combat, even though rarely.

It’s good that Trek to Yomi tries something that on the surface at least seems different, but it unfortunately isn’t as good as it could be.

avoided this because I figured it'd be a kind of lame film school dude's fetishisms of 50s Japanese Samurai cinema.

And I guess it kind of is, in a way. but no more shallow than any other character action video game that apes from cinema is, except this game's concept of camera placement and framing is actually pretty fucking stellar. it's genuinely more cinematic than games like God of War or Ghost of Tsushima think they are. trek to yomi might be one of the most beautiful games I've ever played.

at times it's sort of choked by its visual aesthetic, a lot of the game feels very dry. but it's basically if Journey went Kurosawa mode for 5 hours. if you've played any modern side-scrolling action game, you might not be impressed. if you've seen Sanjuro you might not be impressed. but honestly I think those two things go together really well, sort of like buttered toast or chocolate milk. just a very basic but tasty combo (and I mean pretty much every side-scrolling action game I've played thinks it's fucking Vaporware Jesus so this is kind of refreshing to some degree).

Not a terrible game, but also not great. Having not seen a single Kurosawa movie, any kind of reference this game might be making that could elevate the experience are just completely lost on me. I liked the visual presentation, the black and white does work pretty well and the game had some decently memorable vistas on its 5 or so hour runtime. Even at this length it did feel padded out a times, you really spend a long ass time before you actually get to the titular Yomi. Once you are there though the game gets fairly more interesting with the levels being more creative and introducing several enemy types that make the combat a bit more varied right when its starting to get on my nerves. By the end of the game I was kinda sick of it again, its just too simple and clunky. One of the most consistent strategies I found was turning around and spamming the move that hits anything near my back, and that worked for like 90% of encounters. Story was also pretty whatever, just a revenge plot with no memorable characters.

I won this game through SteamGifts.

As a vow to his dying Sensei, the young samurai Hiroki is sworn to protect his town and the people he loves against all threats. Faced with tragedy and bound to duty, the lone samurai must voyage beyond life and death to confront himself and decide his path forward.

The story was compelling and interesting, with beautiful monochromatic artstyle and frustrating combat, the game offers a pretty okay-ish experience. I really did want to enjoy it more honestly, but the combat and the fact that there was multiple endings that didn't really differ in any other way other than ONE choice right at the end of chapter 6 and the ending scene with the final boss, it was an experience I wished I could have gone through faster.

I managed to play through the game once on ronin difficulty while getting the no hit boss achievements, and a second run with the kensei difficulty. I save scummed for one of the endings to avoid the need to run through the game again, since I didn't really see a need for it. My favorite ending was probably the love route, and it really was heartwarming at the end.

I honestly think people who can manage through the combat will really enjoy the game, but I don't think it's worth almost 20€, so if you do decide to get it, get it at a big sale for sure or a bundle. That being said, I do think it's worth a recommendation from me anyway.

The art direction and visuals for this game are ridiculously good. Love seeing the way the scenes shifted perspective as it went on.

The combat however, was too ambitious and too inconsistent with its weird parry timings that it was just frustrating with the hordes of enemies past chapter 3.

Game is best experienced on easy mode and treated as a beat ‘Em up so you can actually enjoy the visuals and get to the end.

"Leonard Menchiari presents: a Leonard Menchiari game by Leonard Menchiari"

Who is Leonard Menchiari, you ask? I don't know! Apparently he made a couple indie games someone might have heard of. Whether that warrants this sort of masturbatory Kojima-esque self-aggrandizing all over the title sequence of Trek to Yomi, I'll leave up to you to decide. I find it irritating even when famous ones do it, let alone those without any significant pedigree.

As for Trek to Yomi itself, what we are looking at is a fairly mediocre sidescrolling swordfighting game with a grainy black and white aesthetic meant solely to cash in on the popularity of Ghost of Tsushima, which had an optional "Kurosawa mode" which I have to assume nobody used for more than ten minutes.

"Optional" being the operative word there, since many of the games that opt to include a black and white mode and know it can get in the way, the aforementioned Tsushima but also F.E.A.R. creator Craig Hubbard's trippy and experimental Betrayer, tend to leave it up to the player to decide whether to stick with the colorless aesthetic or not. Not so Trek to Yomi, which forces it from start to finish, though it at least allows for the removal of film grain. Someone managed to mod the PC version to restore the color, which makes the game look considerably nicer and resolve many of the visibility issues, but since this is not an official patch and the console versions offer no such possibility, one can't judge the game based on how it looks in color.

And get in the way it does, since, combined with the fixed camera angles during exploration segments (I say exploration but it's more going from one combat encounter to the next) makes the environments irritating to navigate: you will lose sight of your character when the camera changes to a wide angle, something Resident Evil expertly avoided via the use of, well, color. There is a reason Leon and Claire wear such garishly colored clothes in the original RE2. Sometimes your character will blend in with the scenery so much that it will be almost impossible to properly time a parry, leading to great frustration, an issue compounded by the poor placement of some of the checkpoints: while in most cases these are judiciously doled out after a long fight, there are times when they are not, forcing long boring replays of previously cleared enemy encounters just to return to where you were.

Perhaps worst of all, and especially egregious, since the lead designer pretentiously styles himself as an "interactive film director", the game does not look like the black and white samurai movies it purports to homage: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood (which the game namedrops), the works, none of them look like this game does stylistically. This is a problem that Trek to Yomi shares with Ghost of Tsushima, though, as I said, the optional nature of that mode made it a non issue in the case of Sucker Punch's title, when it's mandatory here.

The game features a number of collectibles, some in the open, some in secret areas barely off the main path: from lore items to scrolls with new moves, health and stamina upgrades, to ammunition for three different ranged weapons. Trouble is, these pickups are virtually invisible in the black and white scenery, requiring the developers to add a shimmer so they won't be passed by unnoticed. Trouble is, it's still impossible to tell what they are most of the time, which is especially vexing when ammo is concerned: sure, the game will tell you "ammo limit reached" but it will neglect to mentioned what ammo you had found. This means you will never get a sense of how rare or common the ammunition for which weapon is, as such it will be difficult to gauge how often you should use it.

The gameplay is where this game really falters though: developed by the Polish studio behind the mediocre (though inexplicably popular) Shadow Warrior reboot series, what we are dealing with is some sort of Bushido Blade-inspired game, with a side-scrolling structure: moving from screen to screen, the protagonist becomes locked into scripted combat encounters against half a dozen different enemy types, from standard swordsmen to spearmen, ranged troops and a few magical type enemies who teleport around. Swordfighting is a less automatic twist on the Assassin's Creed combat system: surrounded by enemies who attack one at a time, you are expected to parry their attacks, creating openings for retaliation. Thing is, it doesn't work all that well: sometimes enemy hitboxes won't correspond with where their blades are, throwing your timing off, or they will ignore your sword slashes, tanking them completely as they become invincible to perform their attack animations. Needless to say, this is not very conducive to any kind of swordfighting simulation. it doesn't help that the game doesn't care about stances or high/mid/low parrying: one size fits all and some of the moves you acquire are so outlandishly overpowered that you'll be hard pressed to use anything else.

Cementing the issue are the difficulty levels: while easy and normal are trivially easy (you will cut down the bosses in less than a minute), hard mode sees fit to double or triple every enemy's hit points, turning them into complete damage sponges (an issue common to the Shadow Warrior games as well), further decreasing the degree of realism. There is a fourth unlockable difficulty, which makes every blade hit lethal, both for the enemies and the player, though with the aforementioned hitbox issues, problematic checkpoints and the boss fights, which tend to be pretty chaotic affairs, that does not sound fun at all. I did not care to play the game again to find out. With all that, there simply isn't a difficulty level that manages to strike a balance between challenge and fun.

The result is that the game feels extremely repetitive and thus overlong, even though it's just the bare minimum three hours in length required for a $20 game. Boredom sets in very quickly and at that point it's a race for what will prevail whether it or frustration, depending on the selected difficulty.

The story follows a young generic samurai, seeking revenge for the massacre of his village by a ravenous warlord. It's very basic stuff until he is slain and has to journey through the underworld to find his killed wife and choose whether to remain in the afterlife with her or forsake her to retun and finish off the warlord, as the bushido code demands. Or, as many players must have done, you can walk by mistake into the bad ending, in which you become the next warlord, which comes completely out of the blue and is neither announced, explained or works narratively in any way.

At the very least, the game offers some quality Japanese voice acting (the English one is mediocre though) and suitably moody traditional music.

Ultimately, Trek to Yomi is a complete disappointment. The combat system is not good enough, nor are the story and characters, and the presentation is mired in derivative pretentiousness.

Skip with no regrets, unless absolutely obsessed with Edo Japan. Leonard Menchiari, we hardly knew ye. Underline "hardly".

foi uma longa jornada... literalmente.

trek to yomi é um jogo bem morno, sua história não é interessante, seu combate é legal, mas não tão legal assim depois de horas e horas repetindo os mesmos movimentos (nem faz sentido aprender um combo que não seja QUADRADO + QUADRADO + TRIANGULO + R1, na minha opinião), até porquê o jogo consegue ser BEM punitivo e injusto se você não se beneficia dos finishers. sinceramente acho que as únicas coisas 100% positivas é a sua duração (que foi na medida certa), o desafio de aprender o moveset de algum boss e o estilo de arte/jogada de câmeras.

se eu finalizasse o jogo apenas depois de completar a história, a nota seria 1/5. só vale a pena jogar esse jogo se você está indo atrás da platina (e boa sorte), pq a história não importa e o mais legal sem sombra de dúvidas é superar seus próprios obstáculos.

é sekiro preto e branco... não foi dessa vez

A arte e a ambientaçao sao bem atrativas neste jogo, acho que é o ponto mais forte, em quesito gameplay ele é básico mas dá uma diversificada em uns combinhos, mas nada muito elaborado

Ponto negativo pra alguns pode ser que ele seja muito monótono, a história é meio óbvia com os acontecimentos que vão ocorrendo, então isso pode tornar o jogo meio chato mas eu gostei do jogo mesmo assim

Se não me engano o jogo possui mais de um final, entao talvez isso possa diferenciar a experiencia de um ou outro

A very pretty looking game with nothing else beyond that really. Combat is insanely simple, parry windows so wide you can take a nap, wake up, brush your teeth, shower, and eat a snack and still have time to parry. Two buttons with different variations that really do nothing for quite a while. Just a very bland game. It's like walking through some pretty cool wallpaper engine japanese vistas and sometimes you have to do some basic combat. Story is fine, I didn't beat the game but i got halfway through it, don't really care about it much. A very style over substance game, if you can handle the first 2 hours being killing bandits that are raiding villages, then knock yourself out i guess. I wouldn't recommend this to anybody though, really.

A fine enough game. I see what they were going for but it kind of falls flat a bit. The combat is really easy, like you can abuse the hell out of the parry system and just beat every enemy you come across that way. Also, film grain and bloom being on automatically are understandable since they were trying to go for a Kurosawa film look, but coupled with the monotone colors and the camera, it just makes things harder to see, especially subtitles. I don't really know what they could have done better. The story is fine as well.

This is a hard game to judge, coming from a small studio it is an interesting experience. To start with the positives, the sound and art direction are excellent. There are some amazing set pieces here that had me stopping constantly. But sadly the most important element was lacking. The combat was boring and unresponsive, it came down to spamming Square square triangle to stagger an enemy then execute because all other options were severely obsolete. I found myself waiting for each area to end as they dragged on but became better towards the end. The story as well is a basic one but serviceable. Overall an interesting experience but hard to recommend unless you appreciate Japanese/Samurai culture.