The Mark of Kri

The right analog stick doesn't move the camera. Push it toward an enemy and a small icon appears above his head, matched to one of the four face buttons, and once three or four men are tagged you're effectively conducting a fight rather than swinging blindly at it. Triangle kills the spearman on your left, square breaks the archer's neck behind you. It's a targeting system built for a controller rather than ported from one, and nearly twenty years of action games have not produced many better answers to the problem of fighting a crowd.

Sony's Santa Monica studio built this before God of War, and the family resemblance is mostly in the appetite for violence. Rau is a huge, bare-chested warrior in a South Pacific-inflected fantasy world, and the game is animated in a broad, clean, hand-drawn style that looks like a Saturday morning cartoon until he opens a man's throat on a sacrificial altar. That gap between the art and the content was the thing everyone talked about in 2002, and it still gives the game a strange charge. Nothing about the character design prepares you for the stealth kill animations.

Kuzo, the crow, does the reconnaissance. Send him ahead and you get a bird's-eye read on a room, guard positions, patrol routes, the pressure plate you were about to step on. Most levels reward patience: thinning a garrison one silent kill at a time from behind a wall is usually smarter than charging in, and the game lets you feel clever about it. When it does force a straight brawl, the crowd-targeting carries the weight.

What has aged is the structure around all this. Levels are tight corridors and arenas with objective markers, the story is narrated in tavern flashback and never becomes more than a frame, and the difficulty spikes hard in the later stages where a missed target assignment means restarting a long stretch. There's no camera control to fall back on, which is the cost of handing the stick to the combat.

It sold modestly, got a PSP follow-up, and then the studio moved on to bigger and louder things. That's a shame, because this is the rare PS2 action game whose central idea was genuinely new rather than refined, and the cartoon butcher at its center deserved a longer career.