Just be careful you don't overdo it, as each successful brushstroke depletes one of Ammy's ink pots. It feels far more natural than playing with a controller and brings a welcome sense of speed and immediacy to battles in particular, letting you pretend for the briefest moment that you, too, could be some kind of ninja calligraphy master. Whether it's a simple line for a scathing slice attack in battle, a circle to draw out the sun, or a messy scribble to make a broken bridge reappear good as new, the mouse is an excellent fit for Amaterasu's Celestial Brush. Hold down Ctrl and a parchment scroll appears on the screen, allowing you to pause the action and draw rudimentary signs and symbols with your mouse over what's playing out underneath. For just as its worlds are crafted from broad splashes of watercolour, so too are Amaterasu's attacks and interactions. Okami's true masterstroke, however, was how it proved that the pen (or brush, in this case) was mightier than the sword. Before Breath of the Wild came along and ruined action adventure games forevermore, Okami was the closest anyone got to a true Zelda successor, its sprawling plains, forests, towns, oceans and chilly mountains housing dungeons and quest-giving NPCs aplenty as you set out on a quest to stop a 100-year-old curse from besieging the land of Nippon once more. Okami's a lot more than just a pretty face, of course.

I sunk over 80 hours into the Wii port back in 2009, but actually being able to see the detail in enemy demons' movements and behaviour instead of gazing at them through the haze of my tiny CRT TV almost feels like I'm looking at it completely afresh – and that's a wonderful feeling to have with any game you love and adore. To be fair, Okami was already a beautiful game when it first came out, but with support for up to 4K resolutions in this HD re-release, the sharp, crisp lines of its inky calligraphy are truly a sight to behold, with each of its large, sweeping vistas looking even more like a Hokusai woodblock painting than they did before. Sure, there are still a few wrinkles and matted tufts here and there, but whatever anti-aging stuff Capcom and Hexa-drive used here, I want it, and I want it now. While Clover itself has since faded into the mists of time (the remnants going on to form Bayonetta studio PlatinumGames), its ink-washed tale of Japanese sun gods and monstrous demons remains as bright and vibrant as ever, the last ten-odd years bouncing off wolf heroine Amaterasu's gleaming fur almost as if they never happened. It's easy to mock Capcom's seemingly endless stream of reboots and re-releases, but if there's one game in the publisher's back catalogue that truly deserves to be reincarnated for the modern age, it's Clover Studio's Okami.

Okami hd controls