Consuming Shadow, The (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Developed by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw
Available on PC through Steam
Not rated by ESRB (Suitable for 14+)
Low quality, budget horror games are a dime a dozen on Steam. Every week, I sift through the terrible trove of trash new releases, picking out the few good ones and shoving the rest on the backburner for a Bottom of the Bargain Bin review. I’ve developed a kind of sixth sense about gaming quality, and can hazard a pretty reasonable guess as to whether most things will be crap from a single trailer and the price tag. Generally, anything valued below $5 with an Unity engine load screen is pretty sure to land on my shit list. Flash is also a big no-no.
My bullshit detector was thrown off by The Consuming Shadow, as the shoddy Flash animation visuals didn’t reflect the bold $10 asking price. It has a “Very Positive” user rating, which granted means very little to me, but was enough to get me to at least look over the rest of the store page. It appeared to be another horror roguelike, touting procedurally generated dungeons and oodles of collectibles. The world needs more copy/paste roguelikes like it needs another ISIS, but at least I can play them drunk, so I might as well give it a shot. I looked for the developer info, wondering what miniature studio I’d be pestering today for a review copy.
Turns out, the sole developer is internet personality Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, sensational creator of the Zero Punctuation review series and single reason why anyone googles “Escapist Magazine.” I’ve been a fan of Mr. Croshaw ever since his YouTube review for The Darkness demo, and have tuned in every Wednesday to see what kind of zany analogies he’ll come up this week to rapid fire deliver in a pleasing vaguely british accent. If I were the type of person that felt comfortable having emotions, I’d make some kind of connection between his work and my desire to be a video game critic. However, hero worship and nostalgia makes me uncomfortable, so I’ll just say that being able to review one of his games is pretty neat.
It also raised an uncomfortable question in my mind. If this game didn’t have Yahtzee’s name on it, would it be $10? Menus, character models, objects, and prompts are all designed with the telltale Flash clunkiness. It’s all blocky and without a sense of real depth, like it was all made by glueing bits of construction paper together. The interior of the car and inventory overlay doesn’t mesh, with too many rough edges and contrasting colors. It looks astonishingly amateur, and really soured my initial reaction.
DON’T LOOK BACK! Because you can’t… I didn’t model the back of the car.
Visual crumminess aside, I stayed with the game 0% out of hero worship and 100% from journalistic integrity. I learned two things very quickly: there’s more to the game than meets the eye, and it’s terrible to play drunk. Volume after volume of bestiary entry, descriptive event text, and crucial puzzle hints taunted my booze addled brain. This game requires you to read. A lot. Not in the RPG kind of “skip it if you want and you’ll probably be fine” way, either. A huge part of this game is piecing together little clues in a puzzle grid, which when correctly assembled will give you the solution for the final banishment of this runthrough’s particular randomized eldritch horror. The amount to explore, experience, and uncover proved too much for my current condition. Admitting the harsh reality of my personal failings, I stopped playing to sleep it off.
Coffee in hand and hangover slowly nursing away, I took another crack at banishing an English eldrich beast. Though there are four playable characters, you only start off with The Scholar, a balanced jack-of-all-trades with no specialization. The first challenge of the game is to correctly not click the “Kill Yourself” button, which of course I clicked the first time out of curiosity. Clicking this will kill you. I honestly don’t know what else I expected. Since it gives you one of the ending achievements, I’ll consider it a win.
Instructions unclear, what happens if I click?
After a brief intro, you get behind the wheel of your car and plot a course through an increasingly demonically plagued England. Traveling from town to town takes time, which constantly ticks down to remind you of the imminent apocalypse. Travel times elapse in a kind of “fast forward” effect, rapidly running down the clock as scenery passes by your windshield. Random events can stop you while driving, ranging from an entire dungeon to a text from your daughter saying she loves you. The random events are always a dice roll, but it never felt like any of them were so pivotal that an entire run was dictated by bullshit RNG.
Towns themselves offer a guaranteed encounter, and the status of the town dictates what kind of options are available. Corrupted towns generally just serve as a single dungeon, while human towns can also double over as shops. Every encounter is presented as a static image accompanied by a text block, so the strength of the writing and your imagination are largely responsible for your investment in the world. This isn’t a funny game, and Yahtzee flexes his macabre storytelling muscles quite impressively. It’s nothing totally new, but varied and compelling. The attention given to every passage and descriptive prose is a clear reflection of his love for storytelling.
The ultimate goal of each individual playthrough is to find the key runes to a banishment ritual, travel to Stonehenge, cast said banishment ritual, and beat a boss. Along the way, you stuff your inventory with useful items in standard roguelike fare. It can actually be kind of difficult to find useful stuff, as generally the encounters necessary to make money replace the situations where said money can be used to buy stuff. It all shakes out fine in the long run, but early on you’ll either find yourself broke or without anywhere to spend your mountain of cash. The extremely limited inventory can also be a pain, as you can’t hold any amount of bullets above six. It makes you go from fully stocked to completely fucked aggravatingly fast, but I guess that’s the feeling of tension he was going for. I can see why he wouldn’t want you to farm lesser encounters and stock up on health packs and hollow-point rounds, but my apparent lack of pockets breaks my immersion.
Alright chittering shadows, I’ve got six bullets and a book. Come at me.
Entering a dungeon switches the game to a silhouetted 2D action mode. You walk from room to room searching for loot and punching monsters when they pop up. The objectives are all simple enough, generally requiring some permutation of “get to the end of the dungeon, then run out.” The twisted enemies all have predictable attack patterns, giving the game a skill cap to balance out the random chance. Part of the fun is figuring out just how all the enemies work, and killing them slowly builds up a bestiary providing insight into their otherworldly origins.
Ending a run gives you experience based on how well you did. At the start of a run, you are shown a map of the constellations, and are able to pick a number of “Birth Stars” based on your level. These stars confer a bonus based on proximity to constellations, meaning that a star halfway between the research bonus star and the health bonus star will give you 50% of each. It’s a cool concept, but generally falls into the same pitfall of min/maxing that most RPGs do.
Although, if you have just shy of 400 stars to place, you can just go ahead and not worry about optimal builds.
The Consuming Shadow is an example of how to make atmosphere with minimal resources. The blocky shapes and shadowy figures mix well with the limited lighting and cramped environments, creating a constant sense of unknown tension. The well realized text narrative creates a mood for the world that transcends the need for cutscenes and full voice acting. The procedural nature of discovering the ultimate enemy engages you in a way a simple checklist of objectives wouldn’t. It feels like you are reading a great book, and I mean that as the utmost praise.
Still, there’s only so good a game of this limited scope can be. Aside from playing through the same kind of adventure with different characters, there’s nothing to do. There’s plenty to explore, tons to see, and a lot to uncover, but once you’ve seen it all you’re basically done. It lacks the insane randomness and difficulty of roguelikes like The Binding of Isaac, which can sap away hundreds of hours of playtime. The Consuming Shadow is an incredibly good game to sink your teeth into, discover the intricacies of, and leave with fond memories. Like a novel, it lasts for a couple of days. I recommend it for for anyone looking for a slower and more methodical title, and should get under your skin in a way other horror games can’t.
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Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
