Stealth games have became more prevalent lately, in a very familiar fashion in our typical 3D forms. We see them coming in as a third person view, such as from Hitman series, to The Last of Us to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And with the explosion of the stealth genre, we have also lately seen stealth infused with FPS (think Crysis series or Dishonoured) or mixed with an action title (think Uncharted or Splinter Cell: Blacklist) or in its purest form in the Thief series. We thought we have seen them all.

We thought wrong.

You see, Mark of the Ninja is a 2D side-scroller with handdrawn graphics. It doesn’t have cutting edge breath-taking graphics or does it try too hard to conform to that. The look and feel is nostalgic and beautiful thanks to the talented team of artists and animators in developer Klei Entertainment that reminds me of the cartoons I used to watch on TV. And with that, it does an amazing job at showing how stealth mechanics can still work even in a 2D platformer. How? You ask. You are flabbergasted by the concept because you can’t exactly hide behind corners or peer out of it, nor can you shoot your dart or stun gun from cover.

(I can’t do this, you say)

Well, let me explain. Mark of the Ninja does an excellent job playing with the light and sound mechanics. Light sources reveal to everyone where you are if you happen to be in the line of sight of the guards, and sounds are represented visually as circular waves emanating from your running footsteps, to dogs barking to light bulbs breaking. A neat line-of-sight effect shrouds areas beyond view in murky uncertainty, while the colour vanishes from your ninja’s garb and the surroundings to show when he’s hidden in the dark. And from a 2D platform, the ninja can hide from a hidden sewer grate on the side, to the drain grate beneath, or to a chandelier above. Additional objects, such as doors or pillars can allow you to hide behind it on a 2D scale.

So for example, say there is a guard blocking my way to the objective, and from his position its is well-lit from a single light source and metres away from the darkness my ninja is shrouded in. No issue there, because Mark of the Ninja provides you with so many options at your disposal. You could use the grappling hook to zip to the hanging platforms overhead and then drop down behind him to do a lethal stab sword in his back. The cool thing is anytime you make an undetected kill like that, the camera zooms in and darkens the background, highlighting you and your victim as you plunge your blade into him and then toss his body aside. Or if you are feeling both creative and sadistic at the same time, you can throw a spike mine behind him, and then subsequently throw a dart to smash the light bulb. The sound stemming from that will distract the guard and prompt him to investigate, and after walking a few steps, triggering the mine and finding himself impaled in so many different angles that he instantly becomes swiss cheese. Or if you are feeling very nice and merciful that day, you could always deploy a firecracker behind him to distract him, and quickly sneak above him unseen while he walks back to check things out.

You begin with very basic moves of moving, grappling and stealth killing from behind, but as you finish levels and secondary objectives within each mission (such as completing an area without being detected or successfully pickpocketing your foe), you’ll earn medals redeemable for new moves that significantly liven up the game and open up your options. There is a move that you can redeem, for example, that allows you to string up your dead victims from an overhead perch, guaranteed to terrorise any guards witnessing that traumatic image. Terrorised guards panic and usually starts shooting blindly, potentially leading to friendly fire as your ninja watches gleefully at grown men peeing their pants and killing their comrades. Or you can use the infamous Metal Gear Solid cardboard box to hide within it, and ambush unsuspecting guards like a trapdoor spider when they walk past you.

The scoring system is very rewarding, achieving its balance between a stealth gameplay and being a killing machine. Your ninja is just a human, and when detected, a few gunshots can kill him pretty fast. This means you can’t brazenly walk into a room and start stabbing the guards in the open. While many stealth games claim you can play them lethally or non-lethally, Mark of the Ninja rewards you with XP when you use either style. If you are like me, preferring to stab every fool that you cross, you’ll earn some points along the way. But if you bother to hide their bodies, the scoring system will reward you more. Terrorize the weak-willed guards and you’ll gain even more (see my tactic above). Or you can just sneaking by the guards undetected to gain plenty of points that way. All these styles are complemented by different “Paths” to suit your playstyle. Take the Path of Silence for example, and the game will remove your sword, forcing you to sneak by everyone and will give you extra distraction tools to do so. Take the Path of the Hunter however, and you will have extra lethal items, but they cannot by replenish and you cannot carry any distraction items. These gives a great deal of replayability.

(No, you will not be able to do that in this game)

The only flaw I can think of is the maddening controls sometimes. You see, on the PC, the right mouse click is used for picking up a corpse, and also to hide behind a room or an object. What if the corpse is very near the room? Then the control will have difficulty differentiating what you intend to do. You might end up holding the corpse when the guard walks towards you, instead of hiding into the room as you originally wanted. It is frustrating, but thankfully not game-breaking.

Mark of the Ninja is a very smart game with a very intuitive design, filled with exploitable logic from guards and challenges you to be creative and to think.  Its linear but multi-route levels are really just collections of puzzles and you gain satisfaction through creative employment of your ninja’s bursting utility belt and moves. And with that said, Mark of the Ninja is really one of the best stealth games you can ever play for its value. Now at less than USD10 on Steam, this is the kind of game that slaps those $60+ multi-million blockbuster hits in its face and screams for attention because it is as good, if not better than those releases.

Plot-centric games are a rare gem nowadays; a needle in the haystack in the midst of action and FPS games that flood the markets these days. Such games are amazingly difficult to pull off, given the immense amount of dialogue combined with the essence of a strong story, which had to differentiate from B-grade plot clichés that we see in most games. But when they do succeed, they shine gloriously.

The Walking Dead: The Game is an amazing example of a game that redefined a genre and going against the grain by breaking away from the cookie cutter mould of action-packed zombie-based games such as Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising and Dead Island. This means that if you are looking to run around the country and kill thousands of zombies, you’re better off playing one of those titles I have just mentioned. Developed by Telltale Games who specializes in episodic adventure games, the Walking Games is in good hands of the team that created Tales of Monkey Island and Back to the Future: The Game. Drawing inspiration from Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, the developers mixed storytelling elements with quick-time events, delivering tension for certain climatic moments. When packaged together with your own emotions woven into it, The Walking Dead: The Game promises an unforgettable experience that will keep you riveted to plot till the end.

(You will be very disappointed if you are expecting something like this)

Inspired by the comic book itself, the game offers nice cell-shaded graphics that complements the look and feel of the comics, with cameos (I wouldn’t spoil it for you) from the main story appearing in the game. The voice acting is super, with emotion dripping in each sentence as a living breathing novel playing out by itself. The game is delivered in bite-sized amounts in the form of 5 episodes, starting in April 2012 and ending in November 2012. Each episode would take about 2 to 3 hours, which provides a short but intense experience aplomb with emotional tension, delivering what Telltale Games promises as the main selling point: that you as a player has the choice to choose your own story and your own adventure. In short, The Walking Dead: The Game is a game that concerns more on what you do than how you do it.

As the player plays through episodes one to five, the game would require responses from dialogue or actions that are timed (with only seconds to react) and critical, requiring the protagonist, Lee Everett, to make decisions that would alter the flow of the plot in a manner similar to RPGs like Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins. If you miss the timer, in some conversation trees Lee will end up being silent, which would have an impact on how others react to him. In other cases, it could result in Lee himself or another character being killed. Unlike Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins though, the moral choices aren’t so clear-cut in being “good and lawful” versus “bad and renegade”, which is true of life. In a post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead where hordes of undead walk the earth, the moral compass is thrown out of the window in the face of survival, making the player perform some really difficult decisions. Take, for example, a scene where Lee is only given 4 rations to a group of 10 hungry survivors with himself included. Would he give to the children out of compassion, or would he give to adults so that they can fight the zombies better? Other notable scenes include Lee having to decide if he should help a stranger by shooting at the zombies, but risking the horde flocking to him due to the noise, or leave her at lurch so that he can have more time to scavenge for supplies while the zombies are feasting on her. The game is peppered with all these hard choices, with seconds to decide, and it becomes a story of how humanity has crumbled and how bleak such a world can be.

When not making choices, the player can examine and interact with characters and items, and must make use of inventory items and the environment. That said, there aren’t many difficult puzzle elements in this game. Most of the puzzle involve menial activities like finding batteries for a radio or starting up a train, which acts more as a pacing to drive the central plot as well as to develop the world and the characters deeper.

Most of these choices and actions would not have mattered if not for a central character in the story: Clementine, a young 8-year-old girl left to fend for herself in an Atlanta suburb after her parents made a very bad call to take a holiday during apocalypse and her babysitter becomes a baby-eater. That is, until the protagonist, Lee Everett, comes along to become her guardian. During the game, Clementine was made to act as a moral mirror to reflect the decisions made by the player, as it shapes and moulds her to be a young woman in this harsh post-apocalyptic world. This is complicated by the fact that Lee Everett is a convicted murderer on his way to prison when the first episode begins, a difficult fact about himself that might work against him in a world where trust is a luxury to come by. And the duo sets off into the scary world in a mad quest to find Clementine’s parents despite having the nagging thought in your head that they are probably dead or worse.

That said, even though the Walking Dead: the Game is marketed as a game with choices, it is not a “Create your own adventure” game with millions of possible outcomes and limitless plotlines. The endings are driven by the same central story and leads to the conclusion that many of our life’s choices have predetermined outcomes, or some would like to call it fate or destiny or God’s will, and therefore some things, regardless of how many reloads you do or if you step back in time, cannot be changed. You might be given a choice, but after playing it a few times, you would realise that your choice may not change anything except for how other people view you. I personally would have liked a lot more diversity in the endings and plot branches, seeing how Heavy Rain managed to make it more diverse and gives it a lot more replayability. On the other hand, the Walking Dead teaches a valuable lesson about the limits of human choice, that despite giving your best shot sometimes, you cannot change a situation, but the situation will change you. It is the journey of building the relationships, losing them, and all the emotions I have felt that makes the Walking Dead so close to the heart and so memorable. The experience is much more impactful as a game than the drama series or comic book can ever hope to achieve.

9/10. (Try it and feel it for yourself. This game is pretty cheap sometimes on Steam, so be sure to check it out to get deals sometimes)