Ronin’s turn-based stealth still hinges on a photograph and five targets

Ronin is a game about a woman with a sword, a photograph, and five names to cross out. It entered Steam Early Access for Microsoft Windows on May 27, 2015, and left it on June 30, 2015. It is turn-based, which is the first thing that surprises people, and it is built almost entirely around not being seen.

The game is developed by Tomasz Wacławek, a designer at the Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, and published by Devolver Digital. A later update added builds for OS X and Linux on October 15, 2015. A PlayStation 4 port followed on November 1, 2016.

The Photograph and the Five Names

The plot is thin, and Ronin knows it. A young woman has lost her father for reasons the game does not explain. What she has left is a polaroid: five former associates of her father, plus her father himself, plus her as a young girl, years before any of this. The five are the ones she blames. The game is her working down the list.

Each target gets marked and crossed out on the photo as you go. That is the whole narrative engine, and it is enough. Ronin gives you a face, a name, and a reason, then hands you a sword and a room full of guards.

The game ends after you kill the last target, the Boss. Whether you were hit during that fight decides the ending. Take a hit and you get the bad ending and death. Stay clean and you get the good ending. It is a blunt binary, and it lands harder than a branching dialogue tree would have.

A prequel comic confirms the girl in the polaroid is the protagonist. It also reveals she enjoys the rush of killing and has never felt more alive than during it. That is a detail the game itself never states.

Gunpoint With a Katana

Wacławek has been direct about his influences. He described the stealth-based business complex level design as a rip-off of Tom Francis’ Gunpoint. That is a useful comparison and an honest one. Both games are about reading a room, planning a sequence, and executing it before anyone can react.

In Ronin, you avoid being seen, then use the surprise moment for a silent kill. Once a fight actually starts, the rules change. You have to dodge attacks and find the right angle to land a hit. You can throw your sword at enemies, which is a desperate move and feels like one.

The movement is where the game separates itself from its inspiration.

• Hang from the ceiling to kill a guard directly below you, instantly, but only if the guard is not an elite.
• Climb walls to reach the ceiling or another area.
• Slide down walls and stick to them.
• Launch off a wall toward a guard for another silent kill.

That list is the game. Every mechanic feeds the same idea: approach from an angle the guard did not plan for, end it before it becomes a fight. Wall climbing is not a traversal gimmick here. It is a second route through every room, and the levels are built to reward you for finding it.

The ceiling hang is the cleanest example. You need the guard directly beneath you. You need them to not be an elite. Get both conditions right and the kill is instant and silent. Get them wrong and you have dropped into the middle of a room full of people who now know exactly where you are.

Turn-Based, and That Matters

The turn-based structure is the decision that makes Ronin work. Real-time stealth games ask for reflexes. Ronin asks for planning. You can stop, look at the room, count the guards, and work out the order. The tension does not come from whether you can react fast enough. It comes from whether you read the situation correctly.

That is a slower kind of pressure, and it suits the material. A woman working through a list of five names should feel methodical. Ronin makes you feel methodical.

It also makes failure feel like your fault. When a guard spots you, it is rarely because the game was unfair. It is because you took the wrong angle, or you forgot the elite, or you threw the sword when you should have waited. The game is legible. That is a compliment.

A Small Game With a Long Tail

Ronin launched into Early Access and left it on June 30, 2015. Here is how the release actually rolled out:

That schedule is worth reading closely. The Windows version spent about a month in Early Access, which is short. The OS X and Linux builds came four months after launch. The PlayStation 4 port came a year and a half after that. Ronin did not arrive all at once. It accumulated.

The genres attached to it read like a committee wrote them: platform, puzzle, strategy, tactical, indie, arcade. The themes are action, thriller, stealth. It is single player, side view. Most of those labels are technically true and none of them are useful. Ronin is a stealth game with a turn-based spine and a sword you can throw. That is the pitch.

What Ronin Gets Right, and What It Does Not

The combat is the weak point. Once you are seen, Ronin becomes a dodging game, and dodging is less interesting than planning. The good ending depends on not being hit during the final fight, which means the last boss asks for the one skill the rest of the game never trained. That is a real design problem, not a nitpick. A game that spends its levels teaching you to avoid fights should not end by testing your ability to survive one.

The story is also thinner than it wants to be. Five targets, five kills, one photo. The prequel comic carries the one revelation the game holds back.

But the ceiling hang, the wall launch, the silent kill from above — those are good ideas, and they are used well. Ronin does not waste your time. It knows what it is.

The Score

The published critical score sits at 7.1/10 across seven outlets. That is the right neighborhood. Ronin is not a game that changed the genre. It is a game that took one good idea from Gunpoint, added a turn-based structure and a wall-climbing samurai, and executed both cleanly enough to be worth an evening. The ceiling kill is the mechanic it will be remembered for.

7.1/10.

Devolver Digital · Flying Wild Hog · indie game review · Ronin · stealth game · turn-based