'Gather round, all of you who would listen: I have a tale to tell.’ So began The Mark Of Kri, as a storm of line drawings gathered to accompany the narrator’s voice with illustration, equal parts Polynesian myth and Disney flair.

Lines solidified into sketches, sketches into watercolours, watercolours into the flat-shaded characters and painted textures of the game, as if even the PS2’s imagination had been captured by the story being told. If Ico had been an architect’s blueprint of a platformer, Kri was more an animator’s impression of a thirdperson action game.

To that end, practically all the genre’s rules – the life bar and super-attack gauge perched in a screen corner, traffic light-coded souls to harvest and redeem for a shopping list of attacks, battle prowess celebrated by a combo counter racing to double digits – went ignored, both too sorcerous and too mundane for its barbarian hero. That hero was Rau: barrel-chested, limbs like tree trunks, wordless other than bellowed war cries, taking the strong-and-silent archetype to an extreme only possible in legend and videogames. However exaggerated, his actions were ponderous and natural, leaving the mysticism to his avian spirit guide Kuzo. A literally eagle-eyed scout, Kuzo could be sent on ahead to provide advance warning of enemy positions – one of two observers accompanying Rau on his travels.



The other was the player, as the tale of Rau’s progress was only slightly less preordained than Dirk the Daring’s in distant predecessor Dragon’s Lair. With no place in the retelling for fumbled jumping puzzles or backtracking in search of some door-opening relic, interaction was limited to pressing him deliberately on down the path of most resistance. So reduced, it becomes a study in premeditated, methodical violence – a sensation later to be reprised by Manhunt, though Kri asks the player to surrender to it with no moral queasiness. Much of the game’s thrill isn’t drawn from combat itself, but from the prelude to it: the Juno Reactor soundscape dropping to a primal murmur, the ‘focus beam’ targeting system snaking outwards in an angry red heatwave and low-frequency hum. Even stealth is transformed by its use as an entirely aggressive posture: an executioner’s tread in place of apprehension.

When Rau finally explodes in man-on-many battle, it plays out as a subverted boss encounter in which he’s the boss, dismembering opponents with passing, almost accidental ease. It’s savagery as characterisation, not gratuitous violence, even if the gawking slow-motion that frames fatal blows suggests the latter – but the shock effect is just as relevant to his in-game audience. When one of their companions is butchered, enemies are briefly cowed into hesitation, giving Rau the chance to switch weapons, targets, or find better ground. Battles turn on choosing the right moment to make a grisly example of an enemy, then using the shocked calm – again, the prelude to the kill – to lunge for the next before they recover.



Some felt this mercilessness to be at odds with the cartoon stylings, but just as the visual treatment was larger-than-life enough to express legend, it allowed the gameworld to be painted in simple, singleminded strokes. Rau is a force of necessary good, and his enemies are simply obstacles until left lifeless in his trail by the most brutally efficient means possible. Stealth is similarly binary, as once Rau has been seen, he cannot creep back around a corner and become unseen – only grimly draw his weapon as the call to arms sounds, and see who will be the last standing. Surprisingly, a bungled sneak attack seldom spells disaster, provided players can adjust from the rhythm of dispassionate assassination to furious battle ahead of Kri’s otherwise regular schedule.