Trek To Yomi

A stunning homage whose blade needs some sharpening

Wait, a samurai game inspired by the black-and-white samurai films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa except with Tarantino-esque levels of ultraviolence? Haven't we had one of those already? You may be thinking of Ghost Of Tsushima, which includes a 'Kurosawa mode' that allows you to play Sucker Punch's open-world epic in monochrome with grainy film filters and Japanese audio.

But whereas that game included it as a somewhat superficial option, Trek To Yomi fully commits to the aesthetic. It's still a samurai game from a Western perspective, in this case that of developer Leonard Menchiari and Polish studio Wild Flying Hog (the latter no stranger to dabbling in Asian tales, having worked on the Shadow Warrior series) but having a Japanese voice cast and a soundtrack using instruments exclusive to its Edo-period setting shows an admirable effort to create as authentic an homage as possible.

The story of Hiroki, seen first as a boy apprentice, then grown up into a samurai and capable killer tasked with defending his village from the threat of bandits and murderous warlords, may not be up there with Seven Samurai, and it lacks Kurosawa's humour, but it's nonetheless more than a simple revenge yarn. The writing mirrors the Japanese creation myth of Izanagi and Izanami, including a journey that takes our hero into the Japanese underworld, Yomi itself.

2D OR NOT 2D

Though it's a fairly straightforward 2D action game in which the goal is to kill or be killed, Trek To Yomi's presentation has a grand sense of scale, its fixed camera occasionally pulling back as the surrounding environments dwarf you like in cinematic platformers (Menchiari was also the creator of excellent 2-bit homage The Eternal Castle Remastered).