There is simple and fun, and simple and shoot-me-already-cause-this-is-so-boring. Venture a guess on which category this game falls in? If you picked the first, then you need to read this review. I was originally excited that there was a Wii puzzle/platformer game that had an interesting game concept of using shadows as part of the game play. The art/graphics had so much promise and I was finally going to be able to dust off my Wii with a fun game; little did I know… Here are my expectations when I buy a game for a major console: look good, play well and make it fun. Some games do average in one or two categories but make it up in the others. It helps bump up a review score if I can walk away from playing a game feeling that I got my money’s worth. Lost in Shadow kept me disappointed from the beginning to the end.
Here is a brief rundown of the game. You are climbing a tower to get your real body back and along the way you collect memories that help increase your health and add weight to your body. As you kill monsters and complete Shadow Corridors (gateways to an alternate puzzle world), you receive XP that help you level up and make your slashing attacks stronger. Each level has three Monitor eyes that you need to collect to be able to pass through the shadow gate at the exit of each stage. Your fairy companion can help you move real-world objects to create new shadow areas or clear shadow obstacles. You can also utilize lamps that either swing or can be moved vertically/horizontally for you to reach areas you wouldn’t be able to reach without manipulating shadows. Your sword is only good against red-eyed monster shadows while the blue-eyed monsters need to be defeated by using various in-game contraptions.
I understand the visual limitations of working with 480p graphics but I’ve seen indie games on other consoles that were 1/8th the price of this game that have had way better graphics. Frankly, there was nothing spectacular about the graphics of this game. Considering that the main character and majority of the environment you interact with are just black shadows, the surrounding background environment could have been more spruced up to help enhance it. Having the same glowing environments with the same brown, green, grey and white pastels gets boring after the first 10-15 levels. Even the shadow movements of the character you play felt so clunky to look at especially when climbing ladders. It seems like laziness took over when the game developer decided to use an opaque overlay of haziness to compensate for not creating a true fog-like environment on screen. There were multiple times when camera angles and objects came in the way or hid your character’s shadow thus making it ascertain where you were. So the concept was interesting but I feel the execution was extremely poor. Even the movement of your body of light in a 3D environment was so clunky and old-style. This wouldn’t have been as big of an issue if it hadn’t been compounded with the myriads of other bad graphic design/animation in this game.
The sound in this game is average and the background music was as boring as the graphics. There were times I caught myself falling asleep because of the music; and the same boring and lulling music plays from the beginning to the end. I think there were a total of 2 or 3 times when the music changes and those were during the levels you are chased by a shadow monster, which I feel was a good execution of game play and sound to get the gamer pumped up or excited while playing the game. The interactive sounds with objects and fighting monsters were less-than adequate and seemed like fillers thrown in because they needed to be in the game.
Now I can understand if the graphics and sound this game were purposefully boring or unspectacular because you are dealing with a game environment of shadows but I totally expect the game play to make up for the visual and aural boring-ness. But no, it had to be a complete letdown. There is nothing wrong with simplistic controls. In fact, I’m all for it since it allows the gamer to focus on other aspects of the game that make it fun. But when you use the same slashing attack to easily dispose of monsters and the only variation is to jump around them to slash at them, that is just plain boring. Then there was the issue of responsiveness of the character on screen when using movement and jumping controls.
It’s really sad that you have to play through 4/5ths of this game to be introduced to an game-changing element that actually made this game interesting to play. You basically come across a weapon upgrade that allows you use light gates that give you a 3D body of light which allows you to get around obstacles and interact with the real-world 3D environment to open up gates and create different shadows. So why did I have to wait till floor 55 to play an interesting game?? If this game play change had been put in to place in the beginning of the game, I might have been kinder with my review score.
Considering the above experience, I feel this game should have been released for the DS with a lower price point. I was extremely unhappy that a $40 game has $6-8 trade-in value within 4 days of it’s release. If the review wasn’t clear enough, this game was a huge letdown and disappointment. There are better puzzle/platformer games with cheaper price points that look good, play good and are way more fun to play. I get this feeling that they tried to copy the first Prince of Persia game with a twist of their own and failed miserably in execution.
