New ‘Retro’ Games Are Hot At The Game Awards

The Game Awards gave us a wonderful celebration of video games, including announcements for a lot of games coming to PC and console in 2025 (and beyond).

But as good as the next AAA titles like Intergalactic look, I am most excited about the retro-inspired game announcements from last week’s show. That includes some long-awaited sequels, and the 2D revival of a classic franchise I loved sinking quarters into back in the late 80s and early 90s: Ninja Gaiden. Let’s take a look at the trailers!

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound

Hot damn, there’s a brand new Ninja Gaiden game coming — and it’s a 2D action platformer.

The reveal trailer for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound shows an anime cinematic followed by a few fleeting seconds of phenomenal-looking game play, with the game’s protagonist (presumably Ryu Hayabusa) leaping, spinning, and cutting down enemies in bloody, detailed pixel art.

Ninja Gaiden started in the arcade before it became a brutally difficult trilogy on the NES, beginning with 1988’s Ninja Gaiden (first released in the west in 1989). The franchise returned in 2004 with the 3D action series, beginning with Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox and expanding to the Wii U and PlayStation 3 by the third game in that series, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge. Several other spin-off titles under the brand name have appeared on systems from the Game Boy and the Master System to the Nintendo DS and even iOS.

Ragebound comes from The Game Kitchen and publisher Dotemu, evidently under license from Koei Tecmo, which owns the IP. The Game Kitchen is the development studio behind the hit pixel art metroidvania Blasphemous (and its 2023 sequel). The Blasphemous series is a brilliant, tough-as-nails hack and slash, and Ninja Gaiden looks to be more of the same — only with the acrobatics of Ryu Hayabusa.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound will be released on PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Steam, and Xbox in the summer of 2025.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Capcom is reviving its own action-adventure hack-and-slash series, Onimusha, with a brand new entry in 2026. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a stylish and modern 3D action game, coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam.

The game is set the early Edo period of Japanese history, as the city of Kyoto “has been”has been transformed by the nefarious Malice with monstrous enemies known as ‘Genma’ stalking the area around.” Capcom says: “Featuring epic sword fights, a lone samurai wields a sharpened blade and the Oni Gauntlet. Amidst the rush of battle and a deluge of blood, he ponders on his reason for fighting.”

This one looks hardcore, more of a AAA revival of the classic franchise than something you might call “retro.” But the Onimusha series dates back to 2001’s Onimusha: Warlords on the PlayStation 2, originally conceived as a ninja take on the Resident Evil series, featuring a protagonist who must navigate a house filled with booby traps and fight supernatural creatures with swords and shuriken. Since then a total of ten games in the franchise have been released, with sales putting it in Capcom’s top ten franchises.

Watch the trailer (age restricted) for Onimusha: Way of the Sword on YouTube.

Okami Sequel

Clover Studio and Capcom’s action-adventure game Ōkami was a hit when it arrived on the PS2 in 2006, with a unique, watercolor brushstroke art style and a very different take on classical Japanese history. The game explores Japanese folklore as the player _. Ōkami was ported to all other consoles (and PC), even next-gen systems up to its Switch release in 2018. The game has continued to be such a solid performer for Capcom that it’s kind of amazing that it has taken so long to get a sequel.

Original director Hideki Kamiya is returning to helm the (presumably untitled?) Ōkami Sequel, announced with an orchestral teaser trailer at the 2024 Game Awards. Check it out:

Other teasers for retro game enthusiasts include Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (which, strangely, looks to be racing game where the world’s fastest hedgehog drives a car), dinosaur hunting co-op Turok: Origins, and Shadow Labyrinth — a metroidvania that is evidently tied to Pac-Man episode of the new Prime Video anthology Secret Level, which brings a very different and darker take on Pac-Man.

We’ll be keeping our eyes on all of these upcoming releases. Which one are you most excited about?