Here's a free 80s-style ninja heist game where you race in splitscreen to loot a daimyo's castle
Back in December, a bunch of cool games had the extreme impoliteness to sneak onto digital shelves while we were losing our hair, souls and marbles covering various gaming award shows. One of those games was Escape From Castle Matsumoto - which can be excused, admittedly, because it's a game about ninjas, and we expect ninjas to be sneaky.
It's a free splitscreen pixelart heist oddity in which two ninjas race to be the first to loot a daimyo's castle. While scouring the mansion in your half of the screen, you can lay traps and obstacles for the rival shinobi. If push comes to shove comes to roundhouse kick, you can also fight them directly.
It's kind of nifty. It looks like it's from the 80s. Here's a video.
I had a play just now and can (re)confirm that I suck at being a ninja. In my defence, I Narutoed straight into the Itch.io browser edition without even glancing at the control scheme. Impetuosity is not one of the ninja virtues, I gather. There's probably an ancient ninja proverb about always reading the manual. Still, it was calming to watch my bot opponent gracefully case the joint while I loitered menacingly in a hallway, trying to find the smoke bomb button.
You may fare better. Perhaps you'd like to up the stakes and challenge a friend, even - there's online, LAN and same-computer multiplayer, according to the Steam page. The developers are mausimus and Chris "Joker" Femo. Good for them, I say. We can always do with more ninja games.
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