Continuing this trend of being incidentally relevant—this IGotW's game was, until yesterday, also the weekly freebie for the Epic Games Store—we have the extremely slick first-person "acrobatic kill" simulator Ghostrunner from studios One More Level and Slipgate Ironworks, a game with high enough production values that I'll probably get figuratively slapped by those who take umbrage at anything being called "Indie" once it passes beyond a certain budgetary level (OK, fine, it's also published by 3D Realms which is owned by Saber Interactive which was, at the time, fully Embraced, so sue me). Truly, I care deeply for such distinctions. Ghostrunner sees the player as the last member of the titular peacekeeping force that were betrayed and slaughtered almost to a man after Mara, the Keymaster, staged a coup against the ruler and architect of the last urban metropolis standing tall in a post-apocalyptic world. With no Gatekeeper around to keep the Keymaster in check, it's down to the very last of these Ghostrunners to repair their broken circuitry, recover all their flashy moves, and take the fight to Mara to avenge their fallen kin and save the city from her tyranny.

Ghostrunner mostly splits its time between first-person parkour platforming business and tough battles where a single shot from even the weakest (yet remarkably accurate) enemies is enough to finish you off. You're quickly taught your main skill—a mid-air dash that can slow time temporarily when held down, useful for dodging bullets last-second and swooping in for the kill with your katana—and eventually acquire more as the game proceeds, each with their own cooldowns. Platforming might involve grappling to points in the environment, running across walls, sliding under gaps or down slopes to build speed, and using the dash to clear the gaps you can't quite manage with your normal jumps alone. There's a certain alacrity to the game that, like with all the best masocore games, will quickly respawn you after any death so as to not disturb the rapid pace it wants to maintain.

Speaking of which, I have died a lot so far. It has yet to deter me, but it can be a bit aggravating in situations where you might need to clear a whole room of enemies and there's no mid-spree checkpointing available. However, most of the time the enemy groups are small enough that you breeze right through and the platforming, though certainly not easy, doesn't feel anywhere near as stringent. What has occurred to me, and often, is that I just need to improve at the game's combat, using all the options available to juke around enemies and move in closer for the kill without just sprinting right at them like a buffoon. What's been helping immensely is an upgrade I acquired—there's a whole of bunch of these, incidentally, but they use a Tetris grid system that restricts how many you can equip at once—where I can just reflect bullets back at enemies by swinging at them with perfect timing. Naturally, this isn't foolproof (and nor am I bulletproof) especially now that goons with machine guns have shown up but it often means I don't have to be so cagey when there's too much open distance between me and my would-be murderer. As long as I get that timing right, anyway. As I've progressed, I've found more upgrades and new abilities and the limited upgrade system means I can figure out which of those abilities operate the best with my playstyle and just double-down on what's effective. Even early on it was invigorating with its sense of speed and style, but as I continue to fine-tune the game to my own specifications I'm finding that I'm enjoying it that much more as I play.

But man, does this game look good. I've had this new system for just over a year now but I'm always skittish about taxing that cute little 3060 GPU of mine so I've not been playing anything too high-spec just in case, but the moderate buzzing (not quite whirry enough to be worrisome) means it's getting plenty of exercise trying to maintain this very pretty game at the prohibitively-high framerate such a gaming experience demands. It's one of the few games I've played since getting the new system where I couldn't even imagine my PS4 handling it at this level of graphical fidelity, let alone my previous PC which was maybe just about powerful enough to run a calculator app provided I didn't give it any long division to do. I'm gearing up a May-long feature that will test its mettle against all the games I couldn't previously get to run so this will be a good warm-up for that.

So yeah, even as annoyingly difficult as Ghostrunner can be I'm finding I'm enjoying my time with it quite a bit. There's always that compulsion with hard games to shake off every failure because you know the eventual victory will be all the sweeter for the struggle, and the key to making that work is to make said inevitable failure as painless as possible; to make it extremely easy to get up, dust yourself off, and jump back into the fray by making restarts near-instantaneous and without forcing you to recover too much lost ground. The large melees against up to tens of opponents are the only big hurdles that have slowed down progress to an unsatisfactory level, but for the most part it's just a rollercoaster of cool moves and grisly takedowns and it feels great when you're in that flow and things are going swell. Worth pushing past that awkward start when I was dying too much from not being able to follow the game's timbre because now I'm having a blast with it. Curious to see how it (and my opinion on it) will change throughout its full trajectory; I'll be sure to supply a post-playthrough addendum as always if things shift one way or the other.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, as predicted Ghostrunner got much better as it went on between all the new powers and the new enemies to take apart (I liked the sword dudes) but man did that final boss stink so let's just call it even and keep it at a 4 out of 5. Though the cyberpunk tropes are all stuff we've seen a dozen times before the sheer amount of style combined with the slick maneuvering and one-shot, one-kill combat (for both sides) meant it was greatly entertaining throughout; one that rewarded inventive approaches to problems when applicable. My per-stage death count even stopped being in the triple figures after the review went up, such was the game's careful tutelage of its mechanics. I'm very much done with the game after that horrific last gauntlet, but I'd certainly be interested in finding out what Ghostrunner 2 has to offer someday.