Kage no Tou / Lost in Shadow is...
A gimmick that never reaches its true potential, probably because Hudson isn't that good at making videogames.I'm sorry, but I'm having trouble liking it.
The aesthetic is definitely heavily borrowed from Ico, which in itself isn't bad, but it doesn't win you any originality points either.
Now the gameplay, it's definitely a really original concept and it has some really clever ideas but it doesn't really take them anywhere.
You learn the basics right at the start, and the rest of the game is built around 2 or 3 gimmicks that quite honestly aren't interesting enough to carry a 10-hour game.
The puzzles are staggeringly easy, I think I haven't actually needed to use my noggin for a single second, because, like I said, they fail to realize the true potential of what they have here and they get stuck rather soon in the game just repeating the same kind of puzzle over and over.
One of the most blatant examples of this are the Shadow Realms, those areas you enter through a big gate in the normal levels and that you have to escape from by finding the exit. The majority of these areas are based around a gimmick where you have to shift the level itself left or right pivoting around the main character, which is a really cool and clever idea in itself UNTIL you realise that the puzzles are never more than a simple trial and error case of "you have to push either Left or Right" which noone above the age of 2 could possibly find fun or challenging.
Moreover, the control themselves are rather clunky and akward. There's too many times when the character's momentum is halted (I hate the fact that he has momentum in the first place) or where he has to SLOWLY crawl up edges (pretty much every vertical jump).
I was going in expecting something really clever, but the more I played the less I enjoyed myself and the more it started feeling like a chore.
It's a clever gimmick, but it's not interesting enough to built an entire game around.
This should've been a 3-hour Wiiware game or something.
posted by Ingen! @ 3:39 AM
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