The Spirit of the Samurai is a game made by Digital Mind Games and published by Kwalee. The Spirit of the Samurai, in all honesty, should have been a move instead of a game. The story and plot are in the right direction for Hollywood, but the game itself needs a lot more polish. The movement is clunky. The character's animations are very jittery and, when in motion, are incredibly blurry from what I can observe. This is due to the fact that the game did not want you to run full speed during the prologue or pivotal events. So your character speed is capped, thus giving you this jittery, blurry image and clunky feeling. These limitations, during the start of the story, can be off-putting for some people just trying the game out. Although these movement limitations are for pivotal moments, it's still a strange choice and should not have been in the game at all. This tells me it required more time if this is an issue right from the start of the game.

The start of the game is also lackluster and gives a poor visual representation of what the rest of the game is; many people would stop playing just from the first five minutes of play. Also, they mask some visual glitches by making the scene dark. The main character will be a black shadow; with the light coming in from the background, kind of like the old iPhone silhouette commercials or that club scene from Kill Bill.

The game is very buggy. There were times I would jump in, and my character would stand up straight. A T pose without the T. Let's call it the I pose. Also, my sword would disappear and reappear in my hand outside of combat. At the beginning of the game, characters ask you to do various things but do not tell you how to do them. For example, a character says his daughter is sick and needs help, and she is at his house but doesn’t say where his home is, making it to where I have to go into every house. There are more glaring issues like this later in the game, but there's so much wrong with the first 30 minutes that I'll keep my focus on just that. Also, the main character is considered important, and someone everyone can trust, but then contradicts itself right at the beginning of the game. A lady tells you essentially that she trusts you, and it's stated that the spirits speak to him through his dreams as if it is a well-known fact that this dude is spiritually in tune and is being spoken to by gods. The main character Takashi shares concern about something bad that is imminent, and then the lady goes on to tell him that his mind is playing tricks on him. So what is it? Do you trust Takeshi’s judgment or not? The result of him being ignored was the entire village being over-run by demons. Good job everyone! Not trusting they guy you all trust?

The Perry is also unbelievably slow in this game. You’re also unable to hold down the block button and then click Perry to block a second or third attack from an enemy, so this requires you to go from an idle position straight to Perry when an enemy swings at you, and that timing is unbelievably fast, so if you try to Perry, a lot of times you will put yourself near death if you don’t do it right just the first time, so it makes pairing not worth it. You might as well just block or dodge. Once players get past all the limitations, this game is incredibly fun, brutal, and satisfying. After playing for a few hours on the Steam Deck, I found the story to be enjoyable, and the combat became very fast-paced and was starting to remind me of Trek to Yomi. A lot of the glitches and limitations to the moment were still present throughout the game, but it luckily did not take away from the heart and charm we have been presented with. I just wish this game had more time in the oven. Hopefully, this game gets a release for the console and has all the polish it needs.

The Spirit of the Samurai is available now on Steam.