13 Samurai

About the game

The Yoshindo sword is on a small island, and so are thirteen samurai who have sworn to keep it from you. You arrive alone, in first person, with a sword and a health bar, and the only way forward is through them.

The island is a handful of rocky slopes, pine trees and clearings drawn in flat, dark low-poly shapes under a night sky. A small map in the top-left corner shows the island and one red dot for each samurai left, and a large red number next to it counts them down from thirteen. Your own health is the red bar at the top. Each samurai is a small armoured figure with a sword of his own, so close combat is a matter of timing: move in, swing, and step back before the answer comes.

Andrei Iacob was twelve when he made 13 Samurai for js13kGames 2023. He drew the island and the samurai himself, wrote the 3D renderer from scratch, and squeezed it all, music included, into the 13 KB limit. The game is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, so its source code is hosted here next to the game.

Playing it here

Click Play, then click inside the game and wait for the short story: the sword is on the island, and thirteen of the best samurai guard it. When the screen says "Press enter to play", press Enter. You start on the island with all thirteen samurai alive. The game does not save anything.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Use the map. The red dots show where the samurai are, so you can come at one of them at a time instead of walking into a group.

Hit and step back. Swinging while the other samurai swings too is a trade; try to swing first and retreat.

Watch your health bar. It is the red bar at the top of the screen.

Credits and licence

13 Samurai was created by Andrei Iacob (who signs the game as Retro-pigeon) and is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The music and effects use ZzFX and ZzFXM, both under the MIT licence. The licence texts and the source code are linked from this page.