Red Masked Ronin: Desires and Shadows

A samurai who paints forbidden shunga by night gets caught when his artwork of the Shogun's sister surfaces, and the fallout costs him everything he has. Stripped of rank, cast out as a ronin, he's now hunted by shinobi under Kuroda Nobumasa's orders, a daimyo who wants his head for the honor of it.

The setup is exile and vengeance: a disgraced artist-warrior wandering feudal Japan with assassins on his trail and no Shogun willing to speak up for him. That's the whole engine driving the story forward, no more, no less.

You move through this world in third-person combat and exploration, cutting down pursuers while the ronin's other life, the one with the brush and the scandal behind it, keeps catching up to him. Between fights there's a sandbox to wander, people to read, and encounters that play out with the tension of a man who has already lost his name and has nothing left to protect but himself.