What if Ninja Gaiden, Pop-Culture and Diablo had a child?
Super House of Dead Ninja evolves around a unnamed kunoichi(a female ninja) fighting her way down a cursed tower in hunt for a massive high-score. She knows all the tricks of your typical ninja and has a wide array of weapons at her disposal: double jumping, wall scaling, airspin-attacks, powerful ninja-magic, bombs, knives, molotovs, caltrops, baseball bats, rocket launchers, kusarigamas, hadoukens and many more.
The controls and basic premise are explained via a comic, included in the game.
Gameplay:
As said, you have to fight your way down a randomly generated tower, with a big assortment of different traps, enemies and bosses. No play feels the same and the situations can get quite tricky in this game. There is almost always a time-limit in your back - forcing you to make haste. Most of your skills and weapons make you outstanding deadly and nimble, and are therefore build around the concept of plunging yourself as fast and adept as possible downwards.
On the way down you find items like time extensions, additional ammunition, score increasers, smart bombs, 1-ups and so on...
Before most of the weapons and items can be equiped and found, they have to be unlocked - by completing many sometimes quite interesting challenges, like killing 30 enemies in a row only using a pistol.
Graphics and Sound:
The game's nostalgic and quite comical graphics consist of beautiful drawn and animated 2D-Art, paying homage to typical over-the-top ninja-stereotypes.
The sound-effects are mostly over-the-top too and befit the frantic pace and crazy culture of this game well.
Most of the music is quite catchy to listen to and offers a suprising amount of recognition value.
Conclusion:
For its cheap price(i bought it for 5$ on Steam) this little game offers quite a unique and well-crafted bland of score-based Action-Platformers and your typical Action-RPGs, which lasts for quite a while, due to its randomly generated stages, numerous unlockables, secrets and skillbased score-hunting gameplay. It even sports an Editor to design your own stages (which of course can be shared with others) and is going to receive future updates.
Everyone who either enjoyed MegaMan, Ninja Gaiden, Diablo, SuperMeatBoy or likes easy-to-get-into-but-hard-to-master-themed Action-Games in general, should give it a try.