Just a Shadow Game is an upcoming indie horror tower defense game developed by IndieLab. The most unique aspect of their approach to the time-honored genre comes in the form of a cleverly crafted deckbuilding element that provides the player with loads of combo attack options, buffs, spells and more, to create a truly inspired experience.
I would compare the art style and general tone to games like Inscryption and Darkest Dungeon, but with enough original design and mechanics to set it apart from its inspirations. After spending time with the currently available demo, I found the developers’ efforts to provide an intriguing and engaging experience were only hindered slightly by the limited budget and studio size.
After jumping into the game, the player is met with a combat tutorial on a blood-soaked battlefield featuring two ritual circles. These zones feature a sacrificial soul in the center that serves as a hostage that must be kept alive so that the player’s pagan summoners can siphon their soul energy to provide the player with resource points to activate cards.
The majority of the cards are buildings that are activated as the summoner dances around the ritual circle, and as a result the buildings activate to attack, whether that be through direct ranged conflict or by spawning attackers to join the player’s twisted army.
Upon completion of each battle, the player loots the area and then chooses a path to take next. These paths are randomly generated on each subsequent playthrough and typically lead to unique encounters where players can find coins to spend at the shop to purchase cards, ritually sacrifice unwanted cards from their deck, or obtain rare spell and building cards through lucky finds on corpses and in decrepit abandoned homes.
The path the player chooses has been cleverly represented as a puppet show that not only shows when a player will reach the next chance for loot, but also when a horde of goblins or other various monsters are on a warpath and headed for destruction. Once I got the hang of the relatively simple card-based tower defense combat style, I started to play the demo over and over, trying new card combinations and attack strategies with each subsequent run.
With a decent variation of magic and melee choices on offer, as well as a relatively synergistic combo system that gives players the option to buff cards for greater quality and quantity, I had a lot of fun figuring out what was the most efficient build to dominate my enemies.
I also found that through sacrificing my own buildings from my ritual circle, I not only could play more powerful cards, but I was also able to add more Pagan summoners when my self-sacrifice pool grew to the required size. The more Pagan summoners the player has dancing around their hostage, the more times each placed building will get activated, therefore, a WAY bigger army is formed to defeat their foes!
Supposedly the full game will be a roguelike that allows for players to carry over unlocked cards and items between runs, but the demo is fairly self-contained in its current state. The story is interesting enough that I want to find out more about the mysterious entity trapped in the game’s code, the gameplay is fun and I’m certain becomes even more varied in the later game, and the art style and music set a wonderfully grim and spooky tone. Regardless, I am really eager to get my hands on the full release, which will likely be some time near the start of the new year.
