Fortunately, by fitting contrast, title character Aragami is reborn with the power to manipulate shadow - meaning that the slinky, ninja-like elegance present in the character’s animation is even more graceful thanks to the ability to blend into shadows and become (aside from close proximity) invisible to the human eye. Lince Works may, deliberately, be stripping back from all that organic evolution and scale of player liberty, but it goes without saying that even at its most simplistic on a structural and design stand-point, Aragami is a fascinating look-back on classic stealth - revamped for a post-modern, concurrently-nostalgic era of games.Īragami puts you in the shoes of an oriental undead warrior, resurrected by a mysterious maiden who tasks you with rescuing her from the clutches of the Kaiho - a well-equipped, brute-force army, imbued with the power of light.

But it’s with notable entries like Chaos Theory, Snake Eater and even contemporary newcomers like Dishonored that’ve cemented stealth’s continuing love of improving, even reinventing itself beyond the mere act of simply memorizing enemy patrol routes. Be it the necessity for strategy, the will-he-won’t-he tension garnered from an AI’s FOV, even something as basic as winding round environments like a snake (trust me no pun intended, that was literally the first metaphor that came to mind), Aragami pays homage to a time when the stealth genre was all about the sumptuous joys of getting from A to B even if, back then, the technical feats were a lot less organic.

What is an aragami