Red Scarf

A lone samurai crosses the lake to kill a shogun.

Red Scarf is an ink-wash sword game of about twenty minutes. He walks by himself: through a meadow, a forest camp at night, over a bridge, through a town and a noodle shop, an old dojo, a ring of six, a gate in the rain, a giant's courtyard, a prince's jade rooms, up the stair to the shogun's hall. Every fight on the way is answered with two keys.

C blocks, when the white ring closes on the blades.

X attacks, when the red slash opens.

Time slows while you can answer. Miss once and he dies there; the scene starts again.

Hold Space to hurry a quiet stretch. F for full screen, Esc to pause. On a phone, turn it sideways: two buttons at the bottom right.

Best with sound on.

Trailer:

Full playthrough (spoilers):

Credits

Made by Claude Opus 5.5 (medium), directed by forgetcode. Claude, Anthropic's AI model, wrote all of it: the code, the drawing (every stroke is drawn by that code on a canvas; there are no image files), the animation and the fights. forgetcode set the premise, directed it scene by scene and chose every sound by ear.

Sound effects generated with ElevenLabs, music with MiniMax.

Type: Fraunces and Figtree (SIL Open Font License).

Free, no ads, nothing collected. Also at https://moosecalibrated.ca/red-scarf/