Game:

Mr. Shadow (2016)

Category:

Review

Duration: 22:31

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2

Mr. Shadow is the gameplay showcase and review this week on New Release Friday. Get ready to be bored out of your mind. Also, be ready for a really inconclusive review. Undeniably, the game isn’t BAD. I just found it to be quite lackluster, but this is coming from the same guy who can’t stand strategy games. I think I just have the attention span equal to the reach of a crescent wrench for ants, and thus, can’t keep interested in a game that doesn’t give instant gratification. Sadly, it was too late to jump ship on recording and reviewing Mr. Shadow after I had already recorded and commentated a couple hours of gameplay. So, here we go.

New Release Friday is a series in which (hopefully) every week I will hop over to the “New Releases” section of Steam and pick-up a game to play for a few hours and give a first-thought review on. This series is an attempt to not only keep content fresh and relevant around the channel by covering current games in a concise and genuine fashion, but also to offer exposure to new games via a relaxed review format to inform potential, unsure buyers.

Described as a 2D point-and-click adventure game, Mr. Shadow gives the impression of being full of atmosphere and pleasing casual gameplay. This is honestly what drew my attention to the game and excited me to play it. I love games that I can just really relax and not have to pay a shit ton of attention to in order to get anything done. When I first started into the gameplay I was sure I had found exactly what I had described. The story was set up wonderfully with a cute scripted cut scene and left me ready to click my way to victory. Even the gameplay started out being similar to what I expected; small things that you’d expect to be interactive were, whether they had purpose or not. It wasn’t long into the first act that I realized I should review my initial consensus on Mr. Shadow’s gameplay.

Things immediately devolved from quirky and enjoyable to interact and experiment upon, to something much different. Maybe I am just too stupid for the types of puzzles presented in Mr. Shadow, but holy crap the first act alone took me like 40 minutes. Most of the solutions and means of progression were way too obscure and made little to no sense. The reasoning for this seems to lie in the combination and usage of items that you would never really expect to go together. The gameplay has no preface of the controls or possibilities, literally just “Here is a cursor. Go.” Initially it seemed that I could only perform tasks one at a time, then it came to light that I would sometimes have to activate something and do something else within a timeframe. My review would be significantly different if all of the gameplay were reminiscent of Act 2.

Act 2 had a dark background and bland foreground that lent to much easier acquisition of interactive items and the like. Things in general made more sense just based upon what items were in place and how the gameplay led to their implementation in solving problems. A yawn generating wind to spin a turbine? Makes sense. Popping bubbles? Makes sense and generates an immediately visible response that you can then play off of. Overall, this stage of the game really gave me a renewed hope for the rest of the game and made me believe that the frustration of the last stage was just poor design in the early stages of development that made it into the final product of Mr. Shadow.

Little did I know, Act 3 was about to ruin my day and the entirety of this episode along with it. It started out with rhythmic/timing based puzzle solving that really was quite good. Once you got it down it all went south; you spend a bunch of time crawling around non-flowing dark tunnels that are just trial and error to gather some lights. This part wasn’t particularly difficult but was just uninspired. Once out, you have to shake some plants to feed some little dudes. The plant glitched and forced me to restart the game completely. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the game saved the state of the current puzzle before you quit; however, you have to restart the stage entirely if you restart. This frustrated the crap out of me, but I went back through it only to find out that the puzzle solving is way too obscure for me to figure out beyond the glitch. Maybe something else gameplay related bugged? Maybe I am just an idiot. It is hard to say with a game this bland and potentially broken; sadly, since it is so new, there are no guides and thus, there is no way to see the actual route and know for sure that the game isn’t broken.
For the review, I am not saying that the presentation or even the implementation is bad in Mr. Shadow. It might simply be that I am not a fan of such games and in turn suck dick. I can’t recommend the game, even at the cost of $2.99 or whatever I paid. It is just too hard to tell if the game is broken or if you are just stupid when all of the elements are way too obscure and it very obviously has the potential to break.

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