Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/585450/Shadows_Awakening/
Premise: You’re a demon that was summoned by a sorcerer/wizard who seeks to use you to stop other demons that are threatening the world. You can’t interact with a material plane. So, you possess fallen heroes to fight your battles in the material plane, while you handle the more otherworldly threats parallelly.
Good:
- The core mechanic of using “puppets” to fight your battles is unique. It’s not part based, rather you switch b/w the astral & material planes. Your main character (the demon) can fight only in the astral plane. On the material plane, you can have a selection of 3 puppets available to you at any given time. You can use any one of these to fight your battles here. This allows you to spice things up, you can switch between demon > mage > ranged > melee seamlessly.
- Expanding upon the concept of having two different planes. It basically means that you have to traverse the map twice, once in the material plane and once in the astral plane. The astral plane is typically devoid of any enemies, so you can use your demon to scout the area and get a feel of the enemies that are present. Some enemies can interact w/ both the astral plane and material plane.
- The concept of astral & material planes has also been woven into puzzles. Often times, the solution will be visible in the astral plane, and then you’d need to use your puppet in the material plane to solve the puzzles.
- The voice acting in the game is pretty good.
- Character art/portraits look good.
- Character models for both players and enemies look good.
- The world progression is linear, but the maps themselves have some branching paths that lead to secrets. So, exploration is decently rewarded.
Neutral/Bad:
- The general look, feel and tone of the world is very different from Kult: Heretic Kingdoms. They nailed the look, feel & tone in Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms. But they inexplicably went w/ a “bright” aesthetic for Awakening.
- It also lacks the day and night cycle that was present in Kult. Which imo is a missed opportunity.
- Some locations are well designed but they don’t look as good as they can because of the colors being too bright or too blue (for ‘dark’ locations).
- There’s little to no blood or gore in this game. Which again is a bit of a turn-off for me personally.
- The puppet system is limited. There is logic in not being able to remove your demon. But, the first puppet that you get is also your main puppet, and therefore can’t be removed. So, 2 of 4 character slots are gone. Furthermore, throughout the story, you’d be forced to use some story puppets, leaving you with only 1 puppet slot for a decent chunk of the game.
- The side quest design is way weaker than its predecessor, Kult: Heretic Kingdoms. You have generic fetch quests and ‘Kill bad guy’ quests for the most part. Problem is, even these are far and few in number when compared to Kult. That being said, there are some quests that still decent.
- To add to the previous point, the world in general feels emptier than Kult.
- Itemization is weak. I don’t look at an item and think, “I wanna make a build around this”. Seems like, itemization wasn’t designed for an ARPG as the uniques & legendary are guaranteed drops in fixed spots. There’s no need to hunt for items, as they’ll come to you anyway.
- The enemies don’t respawn. This makes tracking back extremely uneventful.
- There is no endgame mode.
- Boss encounters are rather poorly designed. Apart from one boss that you can interact w/ only when you pick Evia as your starting puppet, they seldom use an interesting attack.
- More of a personal pet peeve, the puzzles eventually started to get on my nerves. They basically felt like the old PS-era God of War puzzles.
My Thoughts:
I recommended Kult: Heretic Kingdoms because the game set out to be an RPG with action elements, and imo did it rather decently. Shadows: Awakening feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It has some combat elements and a niche mechanic that would be perfect for an ARPG. Yet, it squanders away all the ARPG potential to try to become a good RPG. But, it fails the metrics for a good RPG. I personally won’t recommend it unless you don’t have anything else to play. It’s not bad, but you can see a lot of wasted potential. What’s a shame is that we don’t have mod tools. Otherwise, a mod or two could’ve fixed this game.