Pre-order Shadows: Awakening

I ended up giving Shadows: Awakening a Best of E3 2018 award. I appreciate it — maybe a little too much — when a game is clearly being made not because of market trends, but because somebody really wanted to make it. This is just a straight-up dungeon crawler, presented enthusiastically and with a minimum of cruft. I think it might have been the only game in its genre at the show this year.

This is technically an installation in the Heretic Kingdoms franchise, but it stands alone fairly well. I can say that because I've never played a Heretic Kingdoms game in my life, and the only real effect was that I found myself thinking, "Wow, they really went out of their way to fill in the lore here."

That being said, this is firmly set in the same timeline as Heretic Kingdoms and heavily deals with the fallout from that whole thing where somebody up and killed God. In Awakenings, you play as the Devourer, a demon summoned without a pact by a mage who doesn't give his name. Stuck in the world of the living, the Devourer has to play the hand it's been dealt by following the mage up into the city, and into the middle of a bizarre power struggle. There's a vindictive group of anti-religious zealots crusading in this general direction, out to kill anyone they can't enslave, and the mage called in the Devourer because an unaligned demon is as much a threat to those zealots as a rogue mage, which makes it ideal and unwilling backup.

The central gimmick in Shadows is that you can bring up to four characters into the field with you, three of whom are "puppets": dead people the Devourer has eaten and turned into its service. You can choose one of three dead legends at the start of the game to be your first puppet, which also dramatically influences how the plot will develop: a barbarian king, a notorious ranger, or an elven fire mage and renegade princess. Each one will influence the larger plot of the game, as they set out to try to settle old business with the Devourer in tow.

You've always got control of the Devourer, who doesn't inhabit the same world as the other three. It's effectively a ghost, inhabiting a shadowy reflection of the real world, where sometimes things aren't quite the same. You can switch to the Devourer to make bridges materialize, for example, and sometimes certain walls or obstacles don't exist in one world or the other. A lot of puzzle solutions have hints on deck that are only visible as the Devourer, but you have to swap back to the puppets to interact with the real world at all.

What's weird is that the enemies aren't the same from world to world, either. The Devourer gets to deal with an entirely different set of opponents most of the time, usually ghosts or demons, while your puppets fight zombies or soldiers or giant spiders or what-have-you. Some larger enemies have gimmicks that the Devourer has to deal with before you can take them out, such as shields that can only be destroyed by attacks in the shadow realm, or you can use a couple of specific spells to pick away at enemies from across the divide. One of the most useful tactics, in fact, is that the Devourer's basic attack spell also inflicts a short freeze effect on enemies, even if they're in the real world. You can lock them down, then swap to a puppet to capitalize on the moment of vulnerability.

Once you've got more than one puppet to work with, there's a lot of interesting interactivity between abilities. Dousing an enemy with an oil flask makes it take more damage from fire, for example, or you can summon guardian monsters with one puppet and immediately swap to another to summon more. Characters slowly recharge their health, mana, and abilities independently of one another, so once you've got your sea legs, you're intended to be rapidly switching between your party members to continually set up combinations.

The dungeon crawling bit ought to be instantly familiar to anyone who's played one before. It's an isometric map with a fixed camera, and if you've ever played anything else like it — particularly Torchlight — you should be up and running in minutes. The game seems to accept that, too, as you're dropped into the first dungeon within a minute or so of starting a new game, with minimal automatic tutorials. It really does feel like a game that was made by fans of its genre, intended for fans of that genre, with an active attempt being made to cut down on things that annoy fans of that genre.

It's a little rough, at time of writing. The translation's occasionally wonky, and I'm currently stuck on a boss fight that's seriously inhibiting my opinion of the entire package. I'm also convinced there are a couple of puzzles where I could brute-force them, but wasn't supposed to. It's all a bit janky.

All in all, though, I did manage to come away from E3 with a solid opinion of Shadows: Awakening, and now that I've had some time with it, I feel pretty good about the best-of-show nomination. It shows up, does the job, and murders your free time, as all dungeon crawlers are meant to do.