The Spirit of the Samurai
Skip · Action · 2024
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
It scores 8, under the fair line, at $19.99.
- Length
- 5.9h 9.4h to 100%
- Value
- $3.39/hr
- Reviews
- 61% of 499 positive
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 7 seasonal sales. Last cut ended 11 days ago.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
About the game
A village in peril. A samurai reanimated. An Oni advancing. Fight an army of undead warriors and Japanese monsters as a human, a Kodama, and a cat in this 2D stop-motion action adventure.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce GT 730 | AMD Radeon R7 240 | Intel HD Graphics 630, 8 GB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
18 discounts in the 2 years on record, a median of 75 percent off across all of them, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 11 days ago.
It is pricier than 91 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 93 percent. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter ($9.99, scores 52) and White Shadows ($19.99, scores 45) both outscore it.
More about The Spirit of the Samurai
Steam's global achievement data puts about 10 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. On a 5.9-hour game, the hours short of it still count in its price per hour. Of the 405 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 7 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2024 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,362 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 435 have a larger share.
At 5.9 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
96% start to 10% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
What players say
At this point, most of the problems are fixed. There are some occasional stutters, but restarting the game fix it. In my expirience there was no other bugs. As for the game it's actually quite good, but it could be better. The first half of the game is really solid, with good pacing, decent combat, absolutely dope animation and style and super cool cinematics. As I finished half of the game, I really wondered what...
2 more reviews, 1 not recommended
It's my pleasure to now recommend wholeheartedly this game, with the FIX below. DEV TAKE NOTE PLEASE : FOUND AND RESOLVED THE PROBLEM WITH JUMPING. If you change the default keys layout, sometimes *other* keys than W, A, D won't work. Perfect example, the cat climbing the Watchtower vertical wall, could not achieve any diagonal jump AT ALL. Finally thought to change the move keys back to W, A, and D, and jumping was...
Like most reviews on this page, I really wanted to like The Spirit of the Samurai, and in some respects, I do - I like the look of the game, it's enemies and some of the environments are pretty cool - but there are just too many frustrations that are hard to ignore. Putting aside the marketing frustration where the game is constantly cited as being "stop-motion" (it isn't, it just has some interesting animation...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
The Spirit of the Samurai scores 8/100 on the BANG Score (a skip) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1507120/the-spirit-of-the-samuraiReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Oct 1, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.