Ink Parry: Seonbi Swordsman sees you take on the challenge of conducting the perfect parry

• Ink Parry: Seonbi Swordsman sees you parry anything and everything
• Fire arrows, regular arrows, maces, armoured warriors and more!
• Take on the role of a travelling scholar and fight off foes on your journey, in duels or endless mode

The perfect parry is something entire games, such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, are built around. There's something thrilling about not just avoiding an enemy's attack, but negating it entirely, and it's that exact feeling that Ink Parry: Seonbi Swordsman is looking to replicate on iOS and Android, on sale now!

The gameplay of Ink Parry: Seonbi Swordsman is deceptively simple. Your hero sits at the centre of the screen, as attacks fly towards him and are parried depending on how you move your hand. Cut arrows mid-flight, catch maces and tear open nets as you build up some truly dizzying combos of perfect parries.

Inked off

As you might expect by the name, Ink Parry is rendered in black brush strokes, like classical Korean art from the same period, which also fits the seonbi player character, which would have been a type of travelling scholar in the distant past.

Ink Parry comes with three separate modes to put your skills to the test. You can either take on the roguelite Journey mode, face off against various opponents in Duels or dive into Daily Challenges with all manner of new rules and modifiers to cope with. And if you simply want to hone your skills, there's always Endless Training.

Ink Parry is what I'd dub a pretty perfect game for mobile. I can't speak to the actual quality, of course, but in concept it's exactly what you'd want to while away the hours. And with some interesting art inspired by Korean culture, not to mention a large amount of content to sink your teeth into, it's well worth the $2.99 asking price.

And that's no small feat, especially when larger developers can produce stuff that doesn't meet that bar for entry. Just take a look at Stephen's preview of Boltgun Boom, and some of the issues he had with its rather unusual movement controls, and see where an otherwise exceptional game can stumble.