Trek to Yomi’s black-and-white Kurosawa homage looks the part but runs dry before the credits

Trek to Yomi came out in May 2022 with a look that made people stop scrolling: a side-scrolling samurai game in black and white, grain over everything, like a classic samurai film you could hold a controller through. Flying Wild Hog developed it, with Leonard Menchiari. Devolver Digital published it. It hit PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, then landed on Nintendo Switch in January 2023. The pitch was strong. The execution is uneven, and the unevenness is the whole story.

Trailer, via DevolverDigital.

Hiroki and the Vow to Sanjuro

The setup is plain. Hiroki is a young swordsman training with his master, Sanjuro, when word arrives that bandits are attacking their village. Sanjuro tells Hiroki to stay and goes to fight alone. Sanjuro’s daughter Aiko pushes Hiroki to follow and help her father. Hiroki cuts through the bandits and meets a tattooed outlaw named Kaguro, wounds him, and loses. Sanjuro arrives, kills Kaguro, and takes a mortal wound doing it. Before he dies he makes Hiroki swear to protect Aiko and the village in this life and beyond.

That vow is the engine of everything that follows. Years later Hiroki is a samurai, betrothed to Aiko, who is now village chief. A warlord raids a neighboring village under their protection. Hiroki’s men walk into an ambush and are captured. He reaches the burning village too late to save them from being put to death. The enemy commander tells him the raid was a diversion so the warlord could hit Aiko’s village. Hiroki races home to find it on fire. The warlord is Kaguro, disfigured and alive. Kaguro tells him Aiko is dead, then kills him.

The Descent Into Yomi

Hiroki’s soul falls into Yomi, the Japanese underworld, and the game changes shape. He chases a spirit that looks like Aiko. When he catches it, it turns into a banshee. He subdues it, and it calms and becomes Aiko again. She tells him he cannot save her, but he can save her people from Kaguro. To leave Yomi he has to descend further and prove himself worthy of resurrection.

What follows is a run of trials, including the twisted spirits of his own men and the wretched soul of Sanjuro. His last test is a demon in his own form. The game is asking whether a man who failed everyone he swore to protect deserves to come back. That is a real question, and Trek to Yomi states it without flinching.

Hiroki faces several trials, including the now twisted spirits of his own men, and defeats the wretched soul of Sanjuro.

Light Attacks, Heavy Attacks, and the Stance Read

Combat is the core, and it is built on reading your opponent. Light attacks are fast and weak. Heavy attacks are slow and strong. A well-timed block breaks an enemy’s guard and opens a counter. You can fold directional input into attacks — thrust forward, or turn to slash an enemy coming at your back. The game wants you to watch a stance before you commit. If an opponent holds their sword horizontally to block, you thrust instead of swinging.

Hiroki fights mainly with a katana. As you progress you unlock an ozutsu, bo-shurikens, and ranged options like bows and arrows. The game is set in the Edo period but fills itself with bosses, mythological creatures and supernatural elements. You can sometimes drop enemies with environmental hazards and skip the fight entirely.

The structure alternates between freeform exploration and side-scrolling combat with a fixed camera. It is mostly linear, but there are secret areas with health and stamina upgrades, bonus tools and weapons. Shrines refill health and stamina, and each shrine works once per playthrough. Friendly non-player characters hand out hints about where to go. There is a cinematic mode that lowers the difficulty for people who want the story more than the fight.

What the Black and White Is Doing

The look is the reason Trek to Yomi got attention, and it earns that attention. A fixed camera in a side-scrolling game usually reads as a limitation. Here it reads as a frame. The grain, the contrast, the way a duel is staged like a shot rather than a fight — that is craft, and it holds up across the whole run.

The cost is that the game sometimes trusts the frame more than the fight. Reading stances is a good idea. It is also the kind of idea that stops being interesting once you have solved it, and Trek to Yomi does not have enough enemy variety to keep re-solving it. The supernatural turn into Yomi opens the door for stranger encounters, and the game walks through that door. It does not sprint.

A Release Schedule That Split the Audience

The rollout matters to how this game landed. The console and PC versions arrived together in May 2022. Switch owners waited until January 2023.

That gap is roughly eight months, and it is the clearest fact about how this release was run. The five-platform launch came first. The Switch port came later, on its own.

The Verdict on Trek to Yomi

Trek to Yomi is a game with a better first hour than last hour, and that is the fairest thing you can say about it. The vow to Sanjuro, the fall of the village, the descent into Yomi — that spine is strong. Hiroki’s arc from a boy who left his master’s side to a soul proving he deserves to return is a clean arc, and the game commits to it.

The problem is repetition. Light attacks, heavy attacks, block, counter, read the stance, repeat. The secret areas and shrines add texture but not depth. The cinematic mode is an admission that the combat is not the point for a chunk of the audience, and once you admit that, the combat has to be good enough to justify itself anyway. It is good. It is not great.

The critical aggregate sits at 6.8 out of 10 across seven outlets, and that number is honest. Trek to Yomi is not a hidden masterpiece and not a misfire. It is a striking, disciplined, slightly thin action game that nails its atmosphere and runs out of ideas before it runs out of runtime. If you want a samurai story with a real visual identity, it delivers. If you want combat that keeps evolving, it does not.

action games · Devolver Digital · Flying Wild Hog · samurai games · Trek to Yomi · Trek to Yomi review