Games
Katana Zero came out to raucous acclaim in April, but a lot of people were shocked by its in-depth narrative. We caught up with developer Justin Stander to discuss how he pulled it off.
Under its veneer of 1980s neon and blurry VHS video artefacts, Katana Zero is a game drenched in themes and conceits that have become familiar to any fan of indie games. As an enigmatic assassin armed with a sword and a seemingly-unending list of targets, you use your time manipulation powers to slice your way through reams of armed opponents, bringing it to a crawl to roll through a foe's attack, or to deftly reflect a gunman's bullet right back at him.
While the precise and exacting nature of the moment-to-moment swordplay keeps you on your toes, it's the depth of the game's narrative that might surprise some. According to the game's developer, Justin Stander, he always viewed this interplay between the frenetic kill-missions and the subdued narrative beats as a core strength of the project, and one that he worked very carefully to craft.
Like a lot of independent developers, Stander built Katana Zero pillar-by-pillar, which meant that he had only a"“basic outline" of the story when he finished mapping out the game's levels. While it seemed like an nigh-on insurmountable problem at first, he eventually arrived at a fundamental approach to storytelling that he feels best-suits the action-genre, one based on an escalating series of questions that you're encouraged to answer for yourself.
Stander grew up on sublime action games that would grind to a halt as the protagonist and the second banana argued about politics, or when the villain deigned to deliver a winding monologue. In his mind, an experienced assassin wouldn't just stand there and wait for their target to justify their evil plot – they'd just walk up and stab them, job done. In order to embody that aspect of the player character, Katana Zero allows the player to interrupt any line of spoken dialogue from another character, which includes hanging up on your psychiatrist-slash-handler whenever you want. It's a subtle wrinkle, but one that speaks volumes about the game.
"I knew pretty early on that I wanted to have a character who was sort of trapped in their situation, because those always make for good main characters in action games," he says. "I knew that players weren't really going to like the psychiatrist who's giving you your drugs, because he's kind of a jerk. I also wanted to give speedrunners the option of just buttoning their way through everything for the sake of raw speed. To me, the important part is that the option is there, but there are consequences for taking it. Just like in real-life, people don't like it when you interrupt them, so I wanted to show that in the game."
Based on his own experience with action games, Stander knew that many players weren't going to have much patience for lengthy diatribes on some of the game's headier themes, such as the nature of addiction, so he endeavored to deliver as much narrative and character through the visual elements of the game as possible. While this approach – which Stander likens to "show, don't tell" – might seem obvious to some, it's especially important in the action-genre, where you have even less time for dialogue and exposition than in an RPG.
For example, when Stander wanted to depict a certain major character as tougher than the fodder you've been tearing apart, rather than some bit-player talking about it, he decided to drop you in a short boss-fight that the player is free to win or lose to make things more interesting. In another case, you play through a level as another assassin, granting you a whole new bevy of skills that make his killing prowess quite apparent without him even speaking a word.
In terms of the game's central structure, Stander says that he drew from one of Katana Zero’' obvious inspirations, the similarly retro-tinged Hotline Miami. But whereas that game had you kill reams of mobsters based on nothing more than mysterious telephone calls, here you're tasked with offing targets by a pseudo-psychiatrist, who also doses you with a mysterious drug, which is eventually revealed to be the source of your powers.
Though Stander admits that he was hesitant to tackle issues of mental health and chemical dependency in the game at first, given that he's never experienced either, after doing some research, he began to feel a bit more confident in his depiction.
"I just really wanted for it to feel respectful to the people who really experience these issues," he says. "Obviously, the idea of a time-travelling drug is a fantasy, but I wanted it to feel real in the universe of the game, which meant presenting it in a way that touched upon those experiences. I was worried that people would see it as sort of a superpower, which is true to some extent, but I wanted to be sure to show the downsides, too."
This feeds into what is arguably Katana Zero's most incredible narrative feat: making the player's seemingly minor choices feel meaningful. When your assassin falls into one of his drug-induced fits – depicted by fuzzed-out geometry, incongruous cuts, or other pseudo-glitches, a favorite of indie games – you have no agency over your own behavior, even less than when you're forced to kill your target to finish a level.
The grand arc of your assassin's story is immutable, but you can make some changes in the margins – choosing whether to try to talk your way past an innocent witness in an early mission, or to help your neighbor's cute kid find her lost toy – and, surprisingly enough, these small decisions add up. There's even a secret boss fight for those who truly embrace a particular approach to these story beats.
"It's a part of the game that I put a lot of thought into, even though I'm not sure I really had to. But I'm glad I did," Stander says. "With the DLC coming out soon, I think you're going to see a lot more of those options in the future."
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