So I bought this on Steam the other day and was absolutely in love with it from minute one. I powered trough it within about a week.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/280160/The games premise: You are a vengeful Shadow Ghost-Spirit-Demon...thing called Aragami, summoned by girl to rescue her from the army of Light that took over the game's lands. Your basic goal in each level is to sneak your way past the guards towards an objective and then leave the area again.
The game has a ranking system after each level, although your actual performance has absolutely no effect on further Gameplay. You unlock new skills by collecting scrolls hidden around each Level and that's the only real character progression there is. The game has "awards" that influence your final ranking. There are boni for never triggering an alarm, not killing anyone and killing everyone. So you can get a S rank for both ghosting missions and murdering everyone, as long as you don't trigger any alarms.
The atmospehere, music and animations are really well done for an Indie-Game. I allways hated how in most stealth games, your character never actually looks like he's hidden, because he's either standing out from the background too much or the lighting just makes it seem that the guards are blind, dumb, or both. This game fixes that pretty nicely by Aragami just turning almost completely black the moment he enters shadows, due to him being a spirit. There are still some oddities, Guards have a massive case of tunnel vision for example. And moving even slightly above their eye-level makes you basically invisible to the ground walkers.
It does have a couple flaws. I think it's a little too easy over all. Once you get a couple Skills going you have a massive array of options, while the guards never really evolve much past the "Probably just rats." stage. You get a ranged kill, the ability to create your own shadow surfaces, a mine, a decoy and actual invisiblity. Aragami also just comes with the ability to teleport to nearby shadows, both vertically and horizontally. Once you get a decent grip on it, it becomes fairly easy to ghost the entire level. I think the fact that it's incredibly easy to get rid of corpses is also too lenient. Guards ignore both the fact that the area their guarding is becoming steadily emptier, they also don't care about blood puddles or missing archers. Add fixed patrol routes to that, and the fact they only have two states, alerted and not alerted, and you get a game that should'nt be that nice too you.
I still think it's worth getting tough, there hasnt been a half decent stealth game like this in ages.
Author
Topic: Aragami - Shadow'em up (Read 995 times)