E4's Great British Summer of Games #2: The Curse of the Red Ninja

Curse of the Red Ninja is a simple game about one ninja's quest to prove his mastery of the art of ninjitsu by killing his master Lawrence. A simply premise yes? (though how many ninjas do you hear of called Lawrence – perhaps Laurence Fishbourne in The Matrix). But what lies beneath is a point and click adventure game that's brutally difficult but comically quirky.

Taking the genre back to it's most basic level: there's no inventory to manage, no endless combine X, Y and Z puzzles to solve and movement is just a case of clicking on the relevant movement arrow. This minimalist style also carries to the presentation with visuals combining a crudely drawn and Atari style combat graphics. Although music shows more depth with pieces that are quite haunting and melancholy.

When you do enter combat, it plays out via the use of one attack button only, there's no high flying acrobatics and seat of your pants action here. You find the key on your pc as quickly as possible, press it and hope that you've fulfilled the hidden criteria to even be allowed to kill the enemy just yet (the eponymous Red Ninja is one such foe that possesses this godlike power). Some encounters just repeat too (a possible nod to the repetetion of online games), although even if the enemies respawn you won't so stay sharp.

You might suppose that the lack of complexity either aesthetically or in terms of gameplay would limit the length and variety of this storypiece. Not so, the game combines the adventure series mainstay of cheap deaths (with each death restarting your adventure from the very beginning) with a surprising opposite tactic as there are dozens of ways to "complete the game". Full completion, if such a term is even relevant in this case, would be to gain all the achievements. Some, such as finding all of a certain creature, can be completed very quickly whilst others require more time investment.

It's a curious situation where you're attempting not just to die, but also not to win, in many ways this is an occasion where mediocrity is positevely encouraged. However another more appropirate way to look at it is that this is a game about exploration, it's not about where you end up but about the journey.

Of course no trip is worth taking if the journey isn't interesting, and in one sense this offering represents the essence of an adventure game pilgrimmage. If you can finish the game without being driven off by the challenging nature of it (combat often gives you only a half second to press a new key) or tiring of the constant addition of new perils to memorise then you may well have achieved the essence of Zen Buddhism.

Maybe the message of the creator is intended to be philosophical, life is made up of successes (victory examples in the game include performing adequately as a mailman, using a pie chart for a meeting and other banal tasks) and failures but possessing the indomitable spirit to keep going, even when you think you're done enough or you can't give anymore, is at the crux of humanity. Or it's just meant to screw with your mind by forcing you to look at the tendency of flash games to make you do something which barely serves any purpose (an example of what Terry Wogan's resident Buddhist, Dharmachari Nagaraja, once described gaming as – idle masturbation).

If you look back to the days of text based adventures with fondness then this game will probably set you straight about your nostalgia and you'll have a good chuckle as you reminisce. For the rest of you, you'll probably quit after five minutes and nobody will look down on you for it.