Quick Look: Kunai

Don't forget Worms ninja rope!

Worms rope only mode!

The world art style looks incredible, but I'm not a fan of the sprite style. Also, the splash damage on those land mines, and how it goes through walls and stuff looks incredibly frustrating.

Their pick for the color red seems to clash with all the palettes we saw in the quick look too.

Sooooo hitchy! It was really irritating just watching; I can’t imagine how annoying that would be while actually playing the game.

It’s not a Worms Ninja Rope unless you can hook it into the ground and push yourself into the air by extending the rope.

Ben, as a fan of grappling hook platformers you really need to check out the Umihara Kawase series. Until recently all the games were only in Japan, but now three of them have been ported to Steam and the fourth is on Switch, with another in development now.

I tried for like ten minutes to find a good gif but for now a video will have to do.

@dannyhibiki: I think it might be a rendering issue with the video, rather than the game.

@murlin: Ooooh this looks good. Thank you.

@benpack: In addition to Umihara Kawase, there's a neat grappling game on Steam called Remnants of Naezith. It gets very difficult very quickly, and it also has an impressive speed run.

This was made by the Blazing Chrome devs.

Edit: Same publisher, not developer.

Woah. Extremely hitchy. I can't tell if it's just the video? Because that first death, it looked like.game lost more than a few frames and it resulted in a cheap death. But Ben didn't say anything. And Brad is saying the game is playing real well. Makes me think it's just the video?

Pretty sure the issue is with the video. Hopefully it's not in the raw capture (i.e. maybe they can upload a fixed version).

Because if the game actually did hitch that much there's no way Brad wouldn't have reacted to it.

From the staff in the YT comments:

Hey all - there was a problem with the capture process on this recording. There's some hitching / lost frames you can probably notice here that aren't in the actual game, but were added somewhere in the capture chain. Unfortunately we don't have a file without these hitches, but just want you all to know that it's not the game itself that has the problem - it runs quite smoothly.

haha it also says the same right here next to the video :') under "episode notes". Not sure its been there since the start but at least for the past 12 hours when I watched the first half of the quicklook.

I believe that was just the publisher, Arcade Crew. TurtleBlaze's website lists them as only developing this and Road Warriors for iPhone.

Looks great overall. This was one of the standouts from my time wandering the floor at PAX South, the front-runner being Last Epoch (I love D2).

I picked this game up from this quick look and I don't think it plays as well as Ben thinks. It has some awkward hitboxes (spikes especially) and the grapple hooks auto target surfaces in weird ways sometimes. The level design can be rough. The area where you get the shurikens has a point where you basically flip a switch by an locked door and it opens a door on the other side of the map which has a switch that opens the locked door where the first switch was.

Also I got to that slime boss maybe a bit earlier than Ben did? Or at least bought different upgrades since I each little slime takes 2 hits for me and I did buy the charge sword yet. Unfortunately the game saves right as you pick up the SMGs and the boss seems beyond my ability due to not happening to get the damage and charge upgrades. I've essentially softlocked myself as I leave the area without fighting the boss.

@benpack: That seems to be correct. I thought I had seen a video or article that listed them as the same developers.

@d_w: I'm in the exact same spot man. That backtracking switch stuff was so badly designed, and the level layouts aren't too inspired even if they were more cogently put together. And the slime boss is just absurd. Charming art, but the rest...not great.

The game looks fun but the color palette is a bit bland for me and I'm not in love with the character designs.