Quick answer: A 2006 PlayStation 2 stealth game that never left Japan, remastered in 2022 by NIS America and sold at $39.99. Critics savaged it: 52 on Metacritic for PS4 and 61 on OpenCritic with only 11% recommending it. Players disagree sharply, giving it 83% on Steam and 4.47 out of 5 on the PlayStation Store. It is genuinely strange and genuinely clumsy. It now sells for around $8. At that price it is worth a look.
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
Acquire made Tenchu and Way of the Samurai. In August 2006, months before the PlayStation 3 arrived, they released a stealth game called Kamiwaza in Japan and nowhere else. The West never saw it. Sixteen years later NIS America brought it over, barely changed, and asked forty dollars for it.
What happened next is the reason this is worth writing about. Critics gave it some of the worst scores of the year. The people who actually bought it rated it four and a half stars.
The scores, and the gap
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
| Measure | Score | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Metacritic, PS4 critics | 52 | 7 reviews, 43% of them negative |
| Metacritic, Switch critics | 70 | Only 4 reviews, so treat with caution |
| OpenCritic | 61, "Weak" | 18 critics, 11% recommend, bottom 19% of all games |
| Steam players | 83% positive | "Very Positive" rating |
| PlayStation Store | 4.47 / 5 | 49 ratings, 76% at five stars |
The critic reviews themselves range absurdly far. Digitally Downloaded gave it 80 and called it boundary-pushing. God is a Geek gave 7.5, TouchArcade 70, Games Asylum 8 out of 10. Then SpazioGames gave it 45, Metro gave it 4 out of 10, and PLAY magazine 40.
That is not critics mildly disagreeing. It is a game that people either find fascinating or find unplayable, with almost nobody in between. The split is explained almost entirely by price and patience, and both of those have changed since launch.
It inverts how stealth games work
Here is what makes it worth any attention at all. In most stealth games, noise is the enemy and being seen is failure. Kamiwaza throws both out.
You play Ebizo, a reformed burglar pushed back into theft to pay for medicine for the orphaned girl he raised. He can crash around a house, knock over furniture and roll into things, and the guards behind the paper screens largely will not react. Noise is not the alarm system here.
Sight is, and even that is negotiable. Walk into a guard's line of sight and you get a window to parry it, performing a quick evasive move that cancels the detection. It treats being spotted the way an action game treats an incoming attack, as something you react to rather than something that ends the run. Done well, you can slip past a guard and lift everything off him on the way through.
Ebizo cannot fight. His punches are pickpocket attempts, and the most he manages is briefly knocking somebody down. And there is the sack: every item you steal goes into it, it visibly swells until it is comically huge, and you cannot finish a job without it. You also use it as a platform to reach high places and you can boot it at guards. It is simultaneously your score, your inventory and your main tool.
Almost nothing else plays like this. It is also, as several reviewers noted, poorly explained: the first few hours do not tell you how to sell your haul or how the mask and notoriety system interacts with the townspeople.
Where it genuinely falls down
The remaster is barely a remaster. It was rebuilt in Unreal Engine with dynamic shadows and improved water, but there are no new models, no new animations and no English voice track, only Japanese audio with subtitles. Reviewers consistently described character faces as exaggerated to the point of oddness, and the move to a modern engine made the original's seams more visible rather than less.
A frame rate claim worth correcting. You will find write-ups online stating this remaster runs at a stable 60fps. Reviewers who tested it report the opposite: Tech-Gaming and Games Asylum both describe the output as locked at 30fps on Switch and PC, the same cap as the PS2 original, with the benefit being that the original's frame rate drops were eliminated rather than the ceiling raised. Treat any 60fps claim as unverified.
The controls drew the harshest criticism, with Metro calling them imprecise and faulting the deliberately limited enemy AI. The camera fights you in tight interiors. And the structure assumes replays: the routes to the different endings are obscure, the first playthrough always ends badly no matter what you do, and the new game plus mode strips Ebizo's abilities and makes you earn them again, which several reviewers found more punishing than rewarding.
The price changed, and so does the answer
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
Read the negative reviews carefully and most of them are really about money. PLAY's objection was "a high price and bare-bones remaster". Tech-Gaming's verdict was that at $40 "you might feel like a victim". Metro listed "very expensive" as a con. The complaint was rarely that the game is worthless, it was that forty dollars for an unmodernised sixteen-year-old PS2 game is a lot.
That argument has expired. Steam's tracked historical low is around $8, physical copies turn up under $20, and European listings have gone as low as the low twenties in euros. The exact same game at a fifth of the price is a straightforwardly different proposition, which is why the player ratings look nothing like the critic scores. We ran into the same effect from the opposite direction in our Terminator: Resistance review.
Buy, wait or skip
| You are | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Curious about odd stealth design | Buy under $10 | Nothing else handles noise and detection this way. At sale price the jank is affordable |
| A Tenchu or Way of the Samurai fan | Buy on sale | Same studio, same era, same branching structure and open districts |
| Considering it at full price | Wait | Almost every negative review was a price complaint. It discounts hard and often |
| Expecting a modern remaster | Skip | No new assets, no English dub, 30fps cap. It is a port with better shadows |
| Low tolerance for stiff controls | Skip | The single most consistent criticism across every review |
| You want one clean playthrough | Reconsider | The design assumes repeat runs, and the first ending is deliberately unhappy |
Where to get it
It is on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam, released in North America on 11 October 2022, Japan on the 13th and Europe on the 14th, published by NIS America in the West and Acquire in Japan. List price was $39.99, with a $79.99 Limited Edition that bundled a soundtrack CD, art cards, a furoshiki cloth and an enamel pin.
Do not pay list. Check a price tracker, because the swing between full price and sale price on this one is larger than on almost anything else we have covered. It is also a small download, a little over a gigabyte, so it costs you nothing in bandwidth compared with the installs in our Division 2 review.
Verdict
Worth playing cheap, indefensible at full price. The parry-the-sightline idea and the absurd swelling sack are genuinely unlike anything else, and the premise of a thief stealing to pay for his daughter's medicine gives it more heart than it needed. It is also stiff, badly explained, visually dated and barely remastered, and the critics who scored it in the forties were reviewing a forty dollar product. At eight dollars the same game is an easy recommendation for anyone curious. Assessed against the 2022 remaster across PS4, Switch and PC.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a new game or a remaster?
A remaster of a 2006 PlayStation 2 game that was only ever released in Japan. The 2022 version rebuilds it in Unreal Engine with dynamic shadows and improved water, but adds no new models, animations or English voice acting.
Why did critics score it so low?
Imprecise controls, deliberately limited enemy AI, camera problems in tight spaces, poor onboarding, and a $39.99 price for a barely changed sixteen-year-old game. Metacritic placed it among the worst-reviewed releases of its year on PS4.
Why do players rate it so much higher?
Mostly price and self-selection. Steam sits at 83% positive and the PlayStation Store at 4.47 out of 5, and most of those buyers picked it up at a discount knowing exactly what it was.
Does it run at 60fps?
No, based on the reviewers who tested it. Output is reported as capped at 30fps on Switch and PC, the same as the PS2 original. What improved is stability, since the original's frame rate drops were removed.
Is there English voice acting?
No. Japanese audio only, with English text. Several reviews list this among the reasons the asking price felt high.
How does the stealth actually work?
Noise barely matters, so you can crash around freely. Sight lines matter, but you can parry being spotted with a timed evasive move. Ebizo cannot fight, only briefly knock guards down and pickpocket them, and everything you steal goes into a sack that visibly grows as you fill it.
Which version should I buy?
Whichever is cheapest. The Switch version drew a higher critic average but from only four reviews, so the difference is not meaningful. Content is identical across PS4, Switch and PC.
Where to go next
- Terminator: Resistance, the clearest case of critics and players reaching opposite verdicts
- Trek to Yomi, another Japan-set game sold on atmosphere over mechanics
- Hotline Miami Collection, a far better stealth-adjacent game for similar money
- Axiom Verge, another cult favourite that found its audience late
- Why price changes whether a game is good
- Why publishers keep repricing old games badly
- Browse more Action and Adventure guides
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