The Spirit of the Samurai Steam Charts & Stats

2025 and no ultrawide support, just lame.

"Mostly Negative?" That’s why I’ve reached the point where I don’t trust reviews. The Spirit of the Samurai is a fantastic game—its gameplay is engaging, the soundtrack is beautiful, and the spooky environments are immersive. Support indie games like this!

I'm giving this positive as the recent review score is "very negative". I like: the music, aesthetics, very cool cutscenes (reminds me a little of CapCom for some reason), yokais, I like the little cat running around, I thought the combat would be worse but there is actually some meat to it, voice acting is pretty nice - so overall plenty to like. So far my negatives would be - lots of lagging in fire area, this is clearly not optimized too well. Also the problem with camera in this same fire area, I had no idea where I could jump or not, cause you can not get the full picture of what is below so plenty of times jumping in blind faith and unsuccessfully. I haven't put the game away and still continue so it still has my attention. I'd say it's definitely worth at least the current discount price. 6.75/10 as someone already said.

The game seems unfinished, there are glitches, i.e: the companion cat when stop walking it slides some pixels down, when the character jumps it behaves like with no animation. The combat dynamic is clumsy. The video render doesn't match the characters. I think the game isn't up to the expectation showed in promotional videos. Don't waste money on this.

Game is awesome so far, if you like those 2d Barbarian games then this is like that. It's 2D but with tons of layers for a cool 3d effect. My kinda game man!

Looks beautiful. The physics is unplayable for me. Reminds me of the old game Pitfall, a game I played for about the same amount of time as this game. When I saw this I was imagining a much more nimble gameplay experience. In actuality, it is very rigid and doesn't engage any hand-eye skills. Interesting note, you could probably speed run this game using just the jump button.

I can kind of see why this is getting mixed to negative reviews but I don’t think the game truly deserves it. The game is stylistically very cool with the realistic but stop motion visuals. The combat is good but kind of more like an old school beat-em up than a soulslike. There is a satisfying rigor to it but enemies take a ton of hits. It does feel a bit deliberately off putting at times, I just went through a frankly bad platforming section where the game never specified that I could climb and there were lots of frustrating instadeath conditions. Sections such as these feel more like an inept puzzle platformer. Im going to stick with it because I like the methodical souls combat but I do think it’s worth checking out even with its issues

I cannot recommend this game to anyone, which is sad because it is potentially a great game. Right near the end of the game, I need a lever to put into a device to open a door. I have the lever, but no option to put this in. I've looked online and others have the same issue and there is no resolution. It's March. This game came out in November? December? On top of this, at a certain point, the game severely lags, like, incredibly bad. I didn't know how to resolve this but several solutions said to remove steam overlays. That worked temporarily but then it occured again and again. Restarting the game did help with it. This should not be an issue though. These types of bugs should be fixed by now. For people wondering about my specs, I can pretty much run any other game so far without even the sniff of an issue. With a lot of processes in the background running. Others have the same issues and this is on the games end, and it needs fixed. The combat is ok. I actually was annoyed by some of the clunkyness of it but it was actually not too bad and I like a lot of aspects of it. I'm a strong believer of 'Git Gud' lol. I love the look and atmosphere of the game. The design and combat is actually kind of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game when it worked, which is why it's sad I have to leave such a negative review. If they fix the game, I will change my review as a fixed version of this game is highly recommended, but as is I cannot.

Let's get the good out of the way: Cat. How Cat looks in the cutscenes. Brave Cat. The main character's voice actor. Slaughter animations. The small variety in what you are doing and who you are playing. As to the bad, everything else. As much as I liked the cutscenes and how brutal and Japanese-horror-like they are, I sincerely believe they should have used that budget to polish the game. This is a 2D platformer adventure game, I have never played a good 2D game with cutscenes of this quality or magnitude. The combat is okay till you and the enemy are standing next to each other, then everyone will get a stroke. Do not try to fight more than 1 enemy at a time, it just doesn't work. There's a combat system with different sword moves I guess. At first, I was like: "Wow nice!" this sure will lead to fun and engaging fighting but it doesn't really, the enemies will... back away after one hit unless stun-locked which is the only way you are killing anyone. Bosses aren't great and most of the time downright silly. Dodge once, hit.. dodge once again, hit. Some bosses can be beaten using an automated script. There's a stamina system but it's explained so badly that it took me till half the game to understand how it actually works. You die in 3 hits but any regular mob will need at least 10 slices, assuming you parried them that is. The UI is horrendously bad. Good thing you won't interact with the menus much but they really needed to hire a UI expert to fix all of this. Running and jumping will get you killed half the time, platforming is not precise especially more so when you are playing as Cat. Every enemy will run away from you and you have no range, it's so frustrating and honestly one of the worst things to ever do in 2D games. Every time you start to have fun the game puts you in a "clear wave of enemies" or "clear wave of prisoners" or "cross this bridge of 10 same enemy type". Those parts are seriously bad, no variety or challenge. There's a huge lack of enemy variety. There were parts where I really was enjoying myself, the small sidequests are fun, they make you feel connected to the world and characters, and the variety of playable characters and events will keep you entertained. There are cutscenes for almost everything, going from one place to another, bosses or meeting NPCs. Exploration sometimes is super cool, dark dungeons and dimly lit underground labyrinths, those parts were probably the most fun I had. Then you reach the final boss. So the story is that bosses were weak before the last patch last week or something (as of the date of writing), so they decided to buff them. The last boss is so infuriating and almost something out of the NES era. Of course, the final showdown between the honorable Samurai and the evil incarnate cannot be a 1v1 duel mimicking the fight between good and evil in this world, the Ying and Yang of the outside world and within, no, it has to be a purposefully maliciously designed encounter, where the real boss is the environment and the unblockable bullshit hitting you from everywhere. This is where I quit, I had almost quit earlier when the game bugged out and I could not make a jump till I bugged out again, but this time in a good way and I was able to continue. I usually don't buy mixed reviews games but I believed those people are making something unique and special and I wanted to support them. 2D with Slow-mo animations, a Samurai and Cat with horrifying enemies, and a story about heroism and sacrifice which I'm all for. However, this game is buried under a mountain of unprecise controls, bad UI, bad balancing, and just a frustrating game loop. It's a mixed experience alright. If you like the aesthetics, feel and look of the game, I think you should try it and find out for yourself what is it like but if otherwise, don't bother.