Begging developers of NES styled action-platformers to put checkpoints in their levels. It's ok to do it, I promise you it's not illegal.

I think there is this prevailing sentiment in some circles that any game fashioned after a 8 or 16-bit classic is inherently good and worthy of praise. I've seen it as far back as Pier Solar and even more recently with the (also WaterMelon published) Paprium. While I don't share the same rapid-fire acceptance of these sorts of games, I am consistently intrigued by them, and it doesn't take much convincing to get me to try one. Unlike those games, Oniken - a Joymasher developed send up to Ninja Gaiden - is not so slavishly dedicated to being able to run on the hardware it is ostensibly made for, but holy hell is it faithful in terms of design.

That's not to say it's this merciless, ultra-difficult game with enemies flooding the screen haphazardly, but there is a strong expectation placed on the player to learn level layouts and enemy patterns through rote memorization. You'll probably be replaying levels almost in their entirety once you hit level 4, and most of my deaths came from being under-prepared for boss encounters than outright dying to stage hazards. This is all very typical of this sort of game, and if anything Oniken is a little too by-the-numbers. Outside of the obvious aesthetic nods to Fist of the North Star, there's not a whole lot here to give it its own identity. Vice: Project D.O.O.M. came out in 1991 and feels more ambitious.

Some of the later levels also drag, and dying to a boss will send you all the way back to the start of the stage. I love Castlevania so this shouldn't really annoy me as much as it does, but the difference here is that Oniken fails to create a satisfying loop, and so it starts to feel like you're just having your time wasted. Once you get the hang of a level, it feels good enough, but by that point my sense of satisfaction from overcoming the odds was diminished by how irritated I was having to redo the same long barrier-filled corridor or lengthy conveyor belt sequence. Many of the bosses are designed around you having less health than necessary to tank them, so their patterns aren't particularly challenging, and I just feel that with the length of some of these levels, Oniken might've been better off with a few checkpoints and some more thoughtful boss encounters.

It's still a perfectly fine game, I just wasn't all that impressed with it. Decent enough given how cheap it is, not a bad way to fill a couple hours on a Sunday morning, but I wouldn't say you should rush out and get this thing ASAP. I finished its six levels and... wait a second, there's a seventh level? Ah damnit...

Reviewed on May 14, 2023


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