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

You'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

Strangely, I didn'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're often being forced to reevaluate what degree of stealth you can actually achieve, with the tools you currently have.

In FTL, you'll shift from "don'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's started, there's only one way it can end: with all the enemies dead. There's one secondary goal, and it's to avoid taking hits. That's a big step down in one sort of complexity.

There'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'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.