Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is a perfect distillation of the series' 37-year legacy and an absolute highlight of Summer Game Fest

Between titles like Streets of Rage 4, Cadence of Hyrule, and The Rogue Prince of Persia, we're starting to see more and more indie studios get a crack at building new entries in venerable franchises. I was already on board for this trend, but an hour with Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound has convinced me that it's the absolute best thing happening in video games today.

I always hesitate to put this kind of hyperbole in a preview piece, but Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is simply awesome. Drop in the caveat here that the full game might have some fatal flaw that drags the whole thing down, but through four levels from across various sections of the game, I've been absolutely hooked.

Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise to say that the devs at The Game Kitchen, the studio behind the best Metroidvania games out there in the Blasphemous series, have created an excellent 2D action game. But Ragebound manages the rare achievement of keeping the spirit of the legendarily tough-as-nails Ninja Gaiden series alive while giving us something that still feels fresh and exciting in 2025.

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Pixel perfect

The first thing you'll notice about Ragebound is how good it looks. The game mimics the cinematic cutscene style of the original NES games, but with striking modern pixel art. The 2D action stages are similarly impressive, most of all for the tremendous variety of animations you'll see. Did the tutorial mission need custom art to show longtime series protagonist Ryu Hyabusa opening a letter or viciously piledriving you into the floor when you fail to defeat him in combat? No, but the sheer spectacle is certainly appreciated.

You play as Kenji Muzo, an apprentice to Ryu who's left behind to deal with a demonic invasion all on his own. The plot likely won't be the main draw here, but snappy dialog offers some nice context to the stages – and gives The Game Kitchen opportunity to continue building on the uneasy religious themes the studio keeps coming back to as Kenji builds an uneasy alliance with the assassin Kumori, who can commune with the demon realm.

Kenji has the abilities you'd expect from the protagonist of a 2D Ninja Gaiden game, with wall-climbing, ceiling-crawling, and sword-slashing all on the menu. It all feels excellent, from the sticky wall-jump to the exact reach of your blade, but the best part is the double-jump – which you can only activate by simultaneously attacking a midair enemy, projectile, or object. If you've played The Messenger, an excellent but unlicensed indie take on Ninja Gaiden, you'll feel right at home with this jump mechanic, but it's a bit streamlined and feels even better here.

Kumori serves as a sort of sidekick – the Kazooie to Kenji's Banjo. Once she joins up with Kenji partway through the game, you can use her to send out various subweapon attacks, like straightline throwing knives or big, arcing axe throws. They're very reminiscent of classic Castlevania subweapons, especially in how they're governed by a limited resource bar, which here you refill by killing enemies.

Ryu the day

The final big wrinkle here is the hyper charge mechanic. Certain enemies will enter the field encased in a colored light, and if you kill them with an appropriate attack – blue for melee, or purple for ranged – you'll be empowered with a supercharge that can instantly kill even the toughest foes. Most of the monsters go down in one or two hits, but some big baddies are either armored or can take a good half-dozen strikes to defeat.

You're encouraged, then, to wait a second or two before engaging the enemy, looking for the enemies you can use to build a hyper charge, and chaining between them to slice through the field in seconds. Like the NES games, it rewards you for memorizing the optimal path through each encounter, but if you make a few kills in the wrong order, it's not the end of the world, as it'll just take a little extra effort to clear the encounter.

Ragebound is challenging, but it's not brutal the way its predecessors could often be. That's largely thanks to the regular checkpoints positioned throughout each stage, which makes retrying the hard parts a snap. If you die, that just means an opportunity to do better next time, and the controls are so precise that locking in that kind of mastery feels incredible.

Take the game's first boss for example, a dragon-like demon creature who kept catching me out after his big charge move, when he'd toss a couple of molten fireballs out that happen to land right at the inconvenient edge of the range of my invincible dodge roll. Every time I got hit, it was clear what I was doing wrong. I died twice trying to beat him, but on the third attempt I killed him without even taking a hit.

You can play pretty sloppily and still get through a stage, but Ragebound challenges you to do better with bonus objectives for doing things like killing enemies with certain types of attacks or clearing a stage without dying. There are also collectibles to find, and many of these mechanics tie into some sort of upgrade system that wasn't available in the demo. I can already see myself running these stages over and over to perfect them before moving on once the final game hits, though.

Ragebound's ability to inspire that chase for perfection is probably the greatest illustration of what it's doing right. It's challenging enough that no encounter is a cakewalk, but it always feels downright obvious how you could've done it better. It's the kind of game where you can immediately picture how wild the speedruns are going to look – a carefully choreographed and very violent dance. I can't wait to play more.

As the Summer Game Fest schedule for 2025 rolls on, you can stick with us for complete Summer Game Fest live coverage.