Red Ronin - Thoughts

It takes a lot of guts to look at sliding block puzzles and think, "You know, if only there was a way to fit some Hotline Miami in here!" Despite reeking of a drunken 2AM epiphany, Red Ronin seeks to do exactly that, marrying ponderous ice physics with violent, frenetic action. And while this blood-soaked Sokoban appears to be a smash hit in its first chapter, Red Ronin's ugly bits will eventually unfurl as its concepts vie for attention. The puzzle side of the game will argue for more complex and methodical setups, while the violence demands more reflex-based traps and harder boss fights. Red Ronin likes to believe these two concepts can work out their differences, but their incessant tug-of-war-ing will come at the cost of the player's patience—and sanity.

At the very least, Red Ronin shows that its premise has legs. Enemies are restricted to moving a square at a time but the protagonist can zoom across the arena until she collides with an obstacle, slicing up any opponents in her path. While you'll feel like a murderous bolt of lightning in the first chapter, each subsequent chapter introduces its own unique speed bump: patrolling bots that kill upon contact, enemies with 2 hp, lasers that sweep across the arena, and plenty more. As mechanics are added the odds will be increasingly stacked against you, forcing you to lean heavily on the game's two collectible resources: time-stop and mid-direction change.

These abilities are integral to Red Ronin as a puzzle game, as a good chunk of the challenge comes from where and when you'll use them. At first these power-ups seem like a cool way to allow for some player expression in battle, letting you take shortcuts to the end of a fight with smart ability use. That, and any leftover power-ups can be taken into the next battle, which can give you a leg up on a tricky opening. But as the game goes on your freedom to use these power-ups diminishes, until you're forcibly chaining them together in a conga line atop a tight rope. The game is absolutely better with the power-ups than without them, but the level of restriction Red Ronin prefers is that of a straight-jacket, offering little room for personal flair, style, or even mistakes. Puzzles often have one solution, and dallying outside that golden zone will undoubtedly result in a swift and decisive death.

Despite the game's numerous issues (which I'll get to shortly), what miffed me most of all was the lack of a rewind function. A good portion of the game's eccentricities may boil down to personal preference, but how do you miss adding a way to undo actions in your turn-based puzzle game? This is an issue that only gets exasperated as the game gets harder, seeing as deaths send you back to the start of a battle, instantly undoing an upwards of twenty or thirty inputs. And since there's little flexibility in how you move through a level, you'll often be memorizing the exact inputs required to get you to the spot you previously died at—and then you better pray you can figure it out from there. Stage inputs will be burned into your retinas as you run through the first half over and over and over again, with small mistakes weeding their way into your actions due to sheer fatigue. The lack of a rewind function may start as an understandable omission, but it won't take long before you'll see it for what it truly is: inexcusable.

While no rewind is a slow-killing poison for Red Ronin, a more immediate and pressing problem the game has is that it isn't strictly turned based. Laser traps and bosses break out of this constraint, operating independently of your turns and actions. This means that as you're sitting there trying to work out your next best move, a boss can put you in his crosshairs and blast you all the way back to the start of the fight. However this rule-breaking is also strangely infrequent (barring Stage 6), meaning you never really get to train the reactions required to play Red Ronin like a coked-up samurai. It's an uncomfortable pivot; for 90% of the game you'll be allowed to play as slow and methodically as you want, but the last 10% thrusts you into a Guitar Hero duel, where missing a single note incurs a reset. Naturally, it's here where you'll rack up most of your deaths, as you'll be backed into dead ends constantly via bad judgment, sloppy execution, or (most likely) a sad combination of the two. For the slower players out there, the bosses are likely where Red Ronin shall bury them.

Strangely, however, reactive players don't get a much better treatment since the game lacks (noticeable) input buffering. Hitting a direction mid-slide doesn't queue that movement up when the slide ends, which makes the protagonist feel sluggish and unresponsive, as if she's taking a leisurely breath between actions. This can lead to a lot of stupid deaths where you're thoughtlessly inputting a correct sequence of actions (up-left-up-right-down) but if you don't wait for each animation to finish an input gets dropped somewhere (up-left-right-DEAD). Worse yet is that activating your abilities can freeze the real-time bosses but only when they're between their actions, meaning occasionally you'll miss your window to pause the boss fight due to a lingering animation. And then the boss with throw bombs at your feet, then the game will pause (but not the bomb timer), then you'll be frantically trying to unpause the game, and then finally blow up mid-slide to safety.

Even if the issues I mentioned so far weren't present, I still wouldn't call Red Ronin perfect. Not only are its puzzles too exacting for a game trying to be stylish and smooth, but critical information is easily muddled by the amount of enemies on screen. Foes lack a visual "danger zone" that lets you see their striking range, hiding the fact that they both move and attack adjacent squares. Although you'll learn this lesson very early on (the hard way), I think it would still be helpful to see their striking range with the press of a button. As more enemies are added into the fray it can be hard to parse which of them will move in what direction too—like, if there was an enemy to your bottom left and one to your bottom right, figuring out which of the two will move into the bottom middle spot first could be integral to your survival. This only gets worse as big guys and far-reaching foes are thrown into the mix, muddying things until there's not much else you can do besides blindly search for the correct path. Ultimately, as fights grow more chaotic and frustrating, you'll come to rely on trial and error to find the way out, which isn't nearly as satisfying as outsmarting your opponents.

Lastly—and I'm hesitant to even mention this—but the story is surprisingly not good. A "cyberpunk revenge story" doesn't need much besides a good aesthetic and cool tunes to listen to, but I was surprised by just how unfulfilling Red Ronin felt. It's main character is a selfish, thoughtless, bitter human being, bosses are weirdly flippant when staring down their would-be murderer, and any pathos the game shows in its dossiers is gone as soon as characters open their mouths. On top of this, the game opens with a cliche, in media res hook of falling of a building—and that scene is nowhere in the game! The whole thing ends on a cliffhanger! For most other video games I usually handwave away the story when it's not that strong, but here I was left flabbergasted by just how hard Red Ronin missed the mark. And it was such an easy mark to hit too!

I don't regret playing Red Ronin but I can't help but feel overwhelmed by its disappointments. I think part of it is that I find the concept really fascinating; most of the time action games get infused with puzzle elements, and not often the reverse. Throw in the fact that Sokoban puzzle games are a dime a dozen, and Red Ronin manages to shine all the brighter: it's nakedly violent, constantly creative (new mechanics every level!), and isn't afraid to give the ol' noggin a workout. But its strengths are diminished by too many asterisks, its two-faced nature splitting the experience in half instead of coming together. If you decide to try it, enjoy the first level—because it's all downhill from there.