Lost in Shadow Review

NOTE: I have not finished this game. I have played enough that I feel like I can give an opinion on. If you are curious, I stopped playing at the part of the third floor in the shadow of the tower.



Oh joy, another game from Hudson attempting to cash in on other large game titles and making their own illegitimate child off of them. The previous title made by Hudson was Calling who took bits and pieces from J-horror films that have at least had a US remake. Calling was one of the most boring games I’ve ever had to come across. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Hudson was working on what was being advertised as an Ico clone.
For the uninformed, which is probably very few of you, Ico was a cult hit released on the Playstation 2 early in the cycle. You played a young boy with horns ostracized and left as a sacrifice in a strange castle. Ico breaks free from his prison and meets an ethereal girl who speaks a foreign language named Yorda. Both want to escape the castle, but the Queen, Yorda’s mother, refuses to allow her daughter to leave the castle. The game is often a case for the “Games are Art” argument along with it’s spiritual successor Shadows of the Colossus. Both titles leave much of the story to the imagination to the player with very little narrative Both games are slated to get a Hi-Def update for the Playstation3 with the superior European versions of both games.
Lost in Shadow tries to emulate the same formula. You play the shadow of the boy who has been stripped from his body and tossed to the bottom of a tower. The shadow meets up with Spangle, a fairy friend who may or may not be on your side. The boy’s shadow only has one goal: to return to his body at the top of the tower. However, he can only travel in the shadow world, which means, if something in the real world creates a shadow, he can travel and grab onto that shadow. Unfortunately, with the exception of the swords, he cannot manipulate objects in the real world. Spangle will help you move pieces and move the light source to help change the angles of the shadows. Eventually, you will be able to gain a “body of light” that allows your character to enter the real world temporarily.
The story is revealed through illustrations that appear when you’ve entered a new area and within the fragments of memories you discover throughout the game. These memories are more useful than just to reveal the story, they also help increase the weight of your shadow, your health bar. If a shadow looses weight to the point of 0, the shadow fades away
The other way to level up and makes a more noticeable difference with your character’s stats is combat. Your shadow will come across a sword that allows him to fight the shadow monsters. While the majority of the monsters you encounter can be easily defeated by your sword, the ones with blue eyes can only be destroyed with objects in the real world. This allows you to set up traps to defeat them. You can change your difficulty setting during gameplay, but some of the way they put you up against the enemies is a little unfair and can be quite difficult. The controls are a little delayed and while you think you’ve pressed the proper button for an action, it will often go unregistered.
The delayed controls also get in the way of platforming. You will often find yourself falling to your death in some places. Much like Epic Mickey, it’s almost as though your avatar can only hold onto certain surfaces. As the game progresses, it becomes even more frustrating as they place narrower surfaces with enemies disturbing your path.
One of the aspects of this game that actually blew me away in the beginning was the play on dimension and light. Since you are a shadow that can only travel in the shadow world, the developers did play with how you can manipulate that. At the beginning, there is a room with these hanging slabs and it looks like you have to jump from slab to slab as they sway in the room. However, because there is a straight line of shadow that appears broken due to the light and objects, you can just walk straight across. You can even see your shadow shrink and grow as the setting reflects on the background and foreground of the scenery. As someone who is a former art student, this was quite a pleasure to see a game take advantage of. Unfortunately, the beauty of it passes as you eventually get use to it.
One of major issues is backtracking. Your first goal is to climb up the tower where you were first split from your body. On the way you find a sword that gives you the ability to go back into the real world with a temporary body of light when passing through certain gates. You have seen these gates earlier, so you instantly learn you will need to backtrack over 50 floors to collect glass shards. I thought I would be done with the game after this, but lo and behold I have more platforming to do afterwards. I have yet to finish the game partly because I got fed up with this pandered out nonsense. Whether or not I finish I’m not sure. I probably will, but I know enough of what’s to come to know where my opinion stands on the game.
Also, you have to collect three monitor eyes to dissolve a shadow barrier to proceed to the next level. Better not die because unless you’ve accessed a shadow corridor, you will have to repeat collecting all of those monitor eyes as the game lacks even the basic function of an item autosave. This’ll happen way more than you want it to with either the difficulty fluctuating or the camera not properly informing you of the space in the area.
While Lost in Shadow has an interesting premise, it is one where the developers could not see that the game needs to be shorter than it actually is. You learn all that is needed to learn in the story earlier than is expected and the gimmick becomes tired rather quickly. Hudson also needs to come up with something more original. Calling was every major J-horror film in the last decade combined into a mess of a survivor horror game and Lost in Shadow so desperately wants to be a Team Ico title. This developer needs to stop borrowing from other successful ideas in hopes of becoming a success. We can see what you did there. Overall, Lost in Shadow is an okay platformer, but you might want to wait for the HD ICO/Shadows of the Colossus bundle coming out in a couple of weeks.