Other games that coexist in this same territory as Mark of the Ninja:
- FTL
- Heat Signature
- Invisible, Inc.

You& #39;d think turn-based vs. not would be a significant distinction, but "pause at any time and queue up actions" is the turn-based of real-time. https://twitter.com/lancharlot/status/1247077328083202048">https://twitter.com/lancharlo...

Strangely, I didn& #39;t vibe with Transistor in the same way as the others, despite it nominally being many of the things I usually adore in games.

All the others I mentioned have something in common that Transistor lacks, though: constantly-shifting goals.

In any of the stealth games I mentioned, you& #39;re often being forced to reevaluate what degree of stealth you can actually achieve, with the tools you currently have.

In FTL, you& #39;ll shift from "don& #39;t lose crew" to "gain crew exp" to "take the ship intact" to "avoid missile damage"

And all of this happens within a single encounter!

By way of contrast, in Transistor, once a fight& #39;s started, there& #39;s only one way it can end: with all the enemies dead. There& #39;s one secondary goal, and it& #39;s to avoid taking hits. That& #39;s a big step down in one sort of complexity.

There& #39;s no real resource management, no secondary hubris objectives that shake up your tactics and force you to engage suboptimally (and nerve-wrackingly, leading to a feeling of "cheekiness" and "getting away with it").

There& #39;s a "Limiter" challenge system, but.

All it really does is make the fights a bit harder -- you still just want to kill your opponents deader than they kill you, and that stays true no matter where you are in a fight.