Kunai is the story of a world that has been ravaged by rogue AI. Humanity has been all but rendered extinct. As the player, you take control of Tabby, a tablet that was fused with the soul of a warrior long past. Now awaked by a group known as the Resistance, you grab your katana and begin a fight to take back the planet. Along the way, you can find new weapons, and even some snazzy hats, while making a variety of expressions on your face-I mean screen.
As a small note, default keybindings for keyboard and mouse play cannot be changed which is incredibly disappointing.
Graphics/Sound
Kunai has charming pixel graphics that feel like something out of a higher resolution Gameboy. The art style of each area is a set of monotone color palettes that fit their themes, but each palette is used exceedingly well and never results in confusion about background and foreground. In short, it is a pleasing game to look at as you stylishly slash through your enemies with beautiful effects and explosions. The soundtrack is also very well done in its 16-bit style. It’s best to let it speak for itself, but I am particularly fond of the desert area’s tune.
Levels/Level Design
The levels in this game can be quite expansive, with many branching paths to encourage exploration. In some cases, they are built to complement the flowing movement of the game quite well. In others, you can be moving at a brisk pace and suddenly be forced into a small corridor with spikes and enemies without warning that result in your taking damage because there is no time to react. Most of this process, however, boils down to one simple and repetitive objective. Go to this area, run up and down every path, find a special object and use it to find a path out. The game would benefit from a bit of mixing up the formula.
Gameplay
Enemies
Most of the enemies in this game are fine. Their types range from drones that mindlessly wander until seeing a player and hurting them on contact, to moving obstacles that you can just avoid, to enemies with guns or lasers or rockets, to giant ax-wielding robots who defend themselves until you jump behind them. However, there are two especially annoying common opponents. The first is robo-bats, which are often resting on ceilings and inactive until a player gets close enough. To be fair, they deal little damage but break the momentum and are frankly just an absolute irritant. These things are small, therefore hard to dispatch especially when they are frantically flying about, and can often be placed in just the right spot where if you’ve just come on-screen moving at a decent pace they can immediately spot and hit you before you are capable of reacting. The others are the numerous enemy types that seem to have a real love for blowing themselves up after rushing to the player. These guys hurt a lot! A single one can half your health and they can usually get close enough where you are unable to escape before being hit by the blast radius (which does not match the visual indicator but at least the indicator is larger than the explosion). The best case to deal with them is to stun them before they explode and kill them, but as discussed in the Shuriken section, this isn’t always easy and that’s not by design.
Bosses
Some boss designs are both challenging and interesting, such as The Guardian’s battle revolving around using the shurikens to cause electrical surges that stun it before you can directly damage in the first phase. It is fun and engaging, rewarding skilled play. Others, such as the Furious Ferro, are made incredibly annoying rather than genuinely challenging with their gimmicks. That fight devolved into sitting in a corner of the room and kill the additional enemies the boss created and waiting for the to circle so I could jump over it and shoot it in the back and on the ceiling when I was safe. Another example is the Zensei battle. The first phrase is just a climbing segment that occurs four times, with each time being knocked down taking longer to get back up and often having to wait on him to spawn clouds for you to use for climbing. Then the second phase you simply have to ascend as he fires rockets from below and climbs after you. The problem is the ceiling prevents the player from seeing where a path to climb is and can result in them being cut off without a quick route to escape and continue their ascent. This isn’t punishing a mistake made by the player, this is a poor boss design based on preventing skilled players from ascending too quickly because they have mastered the movement through their experience thus far. On top of this, if you get caught in such a situation and die, you start from the first phase all over again. It breaks the pace of the game and ruins the fun.
Weapons/Equipment
- Katana: The basic weapon, for the most part, functions just fine. However, the upgraded charge attack requires an automated lock-on to occur before you can unleash it. The problem stems from the fact that a large portion of the time the system just flat out refuses to properly target any enemy you are facing so you have to move around until it eventually figures out you want to kill something.
- Kunai: These little throwing knives come with ropes attached. Rather than used directly for offense, they are used to move grapple onto the environment for swinging and climbing. However, in some cases, you can attach to an enemy and pull them in close, though in my experience this has been more hazardous to the player since you can’t attack while doing so.
- Shurikens: Throwable star-shaped knives that can hit certain switches to provide power to doors or obstacles. They can also stun enemies but not kill them. Again though, they suffer a problem in being able to aim them. More often than not I found myself missing due to my thumbstick being ever so slightly pointing downward when I want to fire sideways or vice versa.
- SMGs: Exactly what you would expect, dual submachine guns with a high rate of fire. They can be used to kill enemies or even keep yourself in the air for an extended period by firing below you.
- Rocket Launcher: Another weapon to be used for dispatching enemies or removing boulders that block access to later areas.
Kunai is a metroidvania, so one of the main aspects of its exploration is finding these tools to unlock different paths in previous and future locations. They also have upgrades for purchase in the Tabb store if you gather enough currency off of destroying enemies as well as crates or opening treasure chests. There are other pieces of equipment given to you throughout the game, such as the double jump ability once you have reached certain points.
Additionally, treasure chests can contain fragments of a heart. When enough fragments are brought together, you are rewarded with health added to your total HP bar as well as restoring any damage you had taken by that point.
Difficulty
For the most part, Kunai isn’t particularly difficult. If anything this game is closer to something easy to pick up but difficult to master. A speedrunner would have a great time with this game. However, in my playthrough I often found my deaths to be the result of cheap tricks, unfortunate timing, or just unfair gimmicks. So, be prepared to die not because you failed but because a grapple didn’t stick, the boss fight has a bad design, the space you were forced into while fighting a suicidal, explosive enemy is far too small, the path or action you were meant to take wasn’t quite clear enough, or other annoying misfortunes.
Bugs
- Repeating bug with fast movement or the charged katana attack causing clipping through walls and immediate death.
- Pressing the pause button and alt-tabbing causes player to become stuck in place until restart. This only happened once, could not repeat it.
- Strange bug where kunai would clip through all objects and make climbing impossible.
Conclusion
Kunai is a wonderful game that I am sure rewards a high level of mastery over its mechanics. It looks great, sounds amazing, and plays quite well for the most part. However, the bugs I encountered and some of the lackluster designs throughout the game often made me either sleepy-bored or frustrated at being killed by events largely out of my control. It feels clunky at some points and I believe needs just a bit more refining but it is a great game underneath it all.
