Creepy conversations with a therapist - they are a therapist, right? - and sad nights alone in an apartment with cable news unspooling the story of your latest atrocity and interesting neighbors through the walls.
An antihero veteran navigating PTSD and addiction to a drug that allows them precognition abilities, a grim throwback cyberpunk world of trashed lots and ragged tenements. There are elaborate justifications for all of this. When you finally make it to the end of one of the game's shortish scenarios intact? Then you commit, and you get to watch a polished playthrough of what you've just done - your solution to a bloody temporal puzzle - played out on CCTV. And beyond all that, there's the conceit that the game's action is played out in your mind as you try and retry each encounter, looping back through time with each failure and finding the best way to tackle the groups of foes you encounter in this finely-calibrated 2D world. You have a sword attack with a decent reach. Yet despite the variations - the mine carts, boss fights, bikes-versus-helicopters, armoured baddies and explosive chuckables - for the most part Katana Zero's laboratory of nastiness is built around a few simple tools. Molotov cocktail and knock back incoming bullets. Out of the mine cart and use it as a shield against the laser grid. Open the door and slice two guys to pieces. Katana Zero gives you a bit more to play with, of course.