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Sega will bring back its classic ninja platformer Shinobi on the Nintendo 3DS, the company said Thursday.

Once one of Sega’s flagship action series, the Shinobi franchise has lain dormant since the release of the 2003 PlayStation 2 game Nightshade. This new iteration is developed by Kirkland, Washington, studio Griptonite Games, whose catalog otherwise consists mostly of licensed children’s games for portable consoles.

Sega will show the game at the E3 Expo beginning June 7. I got to play the demo at a preview event last week and came away quite impressed. Shinobi is built around a parrying mechanic — if you simply try to avoid enemies’ projectiles and sword swings, you’ll end up sliced into sushi. The trick is to use the right shoulder button with perfect timing to parry their attacks, taking no damage. This sounds easy, but enemies will throw out attacks in quick patterns and the timing of your parries has to be relatively precise.

Shinobi will test your platforming prowess.

Besides the merciless slaying of foes, Shinobi is also a test of your platforming prowess. At one point in the demo, I was jumping over that hoary old standby of 2-D action games: logs rolling down a waterfall. Only the third log in the sequence was rolling down sideways, so I had to land my leap onto a platform only as wide as my character.

Shinobi also makes heavy use of wall-jumping segments, not only for climbing but also for descending. So while you start out jumping between two parallel walls to climb to the top of them — and who among us has never done that? — soon afterward, you’re asked to do wall jumps while you’re falling, to slow your rate of descent and kick over to the side so you don’t land in a pit of spikes.

The wall jumps didn’t work quite the way I wanted them to, though, and I fell into the spikes more often than I would have liked. That said, Sega said during the demo that it was tuned a little on the difficult side, and that we shouldn’t “feel too bad” about it.

Besides featuring 60 different in-game achievements, Shinobi is built around a points system. The generous checkpoints and ample extra lives mean that finishing the game’s levels shouldn’t be too terribly difficult. But if you want to finish with a high point total, you’ll want to avoid taking damage (which causes you to lose points) and parry as many attacks as you can.