When it comes to games that are inherently meant to be challenging, I can sometimes find it very hard to sort through my feelings on how to score them. To be clear, there’s absolutely a place for very challenging games, but I would point out that the demands on the game’s performance and controls are then extremely high, in order to give players the best opportunity to meet those challenges. In the case of Sonokuni, you have the mix of a more interesting story than expected, and high-intensity action that demands precision, but controls and performance that may not quite be up to the task, at least on Switch.

Starting with what works, there’s absolutely a Hotline Miami-esque vibe to this experience, but unlike many games that are happy to simply copy elements of what made that a cult classic wholesale, Sonokuni has clearly plotted a path of its own. While perhaps you weren’t coming to this experience for a deeper story that explores individuality and the worries of cultural assimilation, that’s what you’ll get regardless, and it did serve to give everything a little more flavor. In terms of the action, what you can expect is a high degree of difficulty, even though your core set of moves is actually quite limited… you must simply be able to match the appropriate action to the type of enemy and attack that they’re coming at you with, and that quickly gets much tougher than you’d think. 

Outside of simply using the attack, deflection, or slow-motion moves you have at your disposal at the right time, more often than not as you move to higher levels of difficulty the real focus needs to be on where and in what order you take them down. There are certain enemies that you absolutely need to take out quickly, as there’s only a limited time you’ll have before their unblockable attack will kill you, so they need to be your first focus. The problem will be that you can’t usually just run straight at them, as the other enemy types and their attacks will end up dictating how you get there. In order to be successful, what you’ll often find is that you’ll need to take out certain key enemies on your way to other ones, in many ways making the experience almost puzzle-like at times.

The problem is that overall I’d consider the game’s performance and what feels like the responsiveness of the controls to be uneven at times. In particular, when you’re trying to tackle particularly intense rooms even when you continue to repeat the same path and attack methods it can feel like your results will vary, which can be frustrating. There’s no doubt that sometimes you’ll simply make a mistake, dooming yourself, but there are others where it just feels like your success doing the same thing is a bit random. Whether this is a function of the Switch’s performance, the controls, or whatever, I continued to observe that problem multiple times in particularly intense fights. Another issue is that whether it's just the degree of challenge from room to room, or perhaps performance is a factor, it feels like the difficulty level can fluctuate wildly, especially with some of the boss battles that tend to up the intensity even further than normal, and may sometimes force you to lower the difficulty in the name of retaining your sanity. As a package it’s a wild ride and can be a blast, but without the feeling of crisp and reliable controls its contemporaries have managed, it isn’t as easy a sell when you consider all of the above.