Renzy In development

左か右。迷いは敵だ。Left or right. Hesitation is the enemy.

A timing game for iOS and Android about one thing: telling left from right, fast, and being right every time. Enemies run at you from both sides of the screen. Tap the side they come from at the moment they reach you. Each one you cut down is one point. The count only goes up until you miss.

A misty mountain range at dusk with a pale moon above a castle on a rock, and a stone terrace with stairs and a zen garden below. — The painted backdrop Renzy fights in front of. A stone terrace, a moon, and a castle on a mountain, washed toward pale paper so the dark figures always read against it.

How it plays

Two inputs. Tap the left half of the screen to strike left, the right half to strike right. Hold the phone in two hands and use your thumbs, or use one hand and two fingers. There is nothing else to learn: no swipe, no jump, no hold.
One score. Your score is your kill count. There are no multipliers and no combo currency. A perfect strike makes you feel good and keeps the tempo, but it never pays extra points.
Timing, not twitching. Every enemy gives you a window to strike, and the window is a fixed share of how long that enemy takes to reach you. As the game speeds up, the window shrinks in step, so the timing feels the same at every level while the margin for error gets thinner.
Swinging at nothing costs you. Strike too early and Renzy is briefly off balance and cannot swing while the enemies keep coming. You are never killed by the whiff itself, only by what you could not answer while recovering.
Armored enemies. Some of the Hollow Clan carry a raised weapon. The first strike parries and staggers them, the second kills. Land the first one perfectly and it becomes a riposte that kills in a single blow.
Fair by design. The game never schedules two enemies so close together that no player could answer both. Every death is one you could have avoided, and when you die the next run starts in under half a second. Nothing stands between losing and trying again.
It speeds up in steps. Every ten kills the pace steps up a level. The score is a number you can compare with yourself, and the run ends when you stop being able to keep up.

The story

Renzy is the last student of the Two Gates school, a dojo whose whole discipline came down to one truth: everything comes from the left or the right, and hesitation is the only real enemy.

The school was burned in a single night by the Hollow Clan, who fight in endless waves of identical masked warriors. Renzy survived on gate duty, holding the narrow pass alone until dawn.

Now she stands where the ground narrows and lets them come. Her revenge is a count. The number only goes up until she blinks.

That is all the story there is, and it is on purpose. Renzy is an endless score-chase, not a campaign. The backstory is the reason for the look, the sound, and the quiet.

The look

Renzy is dressed in black with a red sash, fighting in a cool ink-wash world of mist, stone and paper. Red is saved for the things that matter: her sash and an armored enemy's raised weapon. Enemy silhouettes are kept dark and her background is never allowed to darken, so you can always see what is coming from either side.

Renzy in the game on a phone: a brush circle around the kill counter 5 in front of a moon, a masked heavy running in from the left and a masked swordsman from the right, with timing rings on the stone ground and a whiff flash reading 空振 WHIFF. — A frame from the game running on a phone, portrait. The brush circle rings the kill counter, the timing rings sit on the ground around Renzy, and the kanji flash after a missed swing reads 空振, whiff.

The character

Renzy is a 3D character, rigged and then posed by hand. Each move is a few key poses I author myself, rendered to sprites so the game stays light and the timing stays exact. Here is the left strike, from the stance, through the coil, to contact and the follow-through.

Six frames of Renzy's left strike: a guard stance, a low coil with the sword drawn back, and the sword extended to the left at contact, then recovery. — Six of the twelve rendered frames of Renzy's left strike, in order. Her sword is a single katana held in her left hand.

Concept art of Renzy standing front on: black sleeveless top, dark trousers, a red sash and red-soled boots, a short blade in each hand. — The original concept art that set her palette: indigo, slate, ember red.

Two masked enemies in dark hoods: a lean one running with a sword, and a heavier armored one carrying a spiked red club. — The Hollow Clan. Masked, hooded and deliberately identical, which is the fiction and the readability plan at once. The lean one is a grunt, the heavy carries the red warning weapon.

Where it is

Status: In development. Not yet released and no release date announced.
Platforms: iOS and Android (phones, portrait).
Engine: Unity 6.
Playable: The core game runs on a real iPhone and was judged side by side against the original prototype to feel identical. Renzy's idle and strikes, the Hollow Clan, the painted world, sound, and haptics are in.
Still to do: Renzy's parry, riposte, stumble and death animation; on-device haptic tuning; performance testing on a mid-range Android phone; store listing and release.
Price: To be announced.
Privacy: Renzy keeps its data on your device and collects nothing about you. See the privacy policy.

I write up progress as it happens in the devlog.

Contact

Questions, press, playtest interest: hello@torotorogames.com. Renzy is made and published by Toro Toro LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company. About the studio →