Shadow Tower Abyss is a dark fantasy role-playing video game, developed and published by From Software in Japan for the PlayStation 2. The game is a sequel to Shadow Tower, and features a number of genre and mechanical elements that can also be found in Demon's Souls and the King's Field series.
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Noticably rushed and the story doesn't really have a middle or end but the setup is pretty neat.
I really enjoyed the combat with the dismemberment system really amping up the default King's Field combat.
I really enjoyed the combat with the dismemberment system really amping up the default King's Field combat.
Shadow Tower Abyss starts off on the right foot. After an enigmatic intro, you're dropped in a forest cave, armed only with a handgun and little ammo. You've just fallen down a pit, and the torch you were carrying goes out in seconds. Then, total darkness, until your eyes slowly get used to their environment. A statue falls right by your side as you inch your way into the dark corridor, nearly crushing you. Lizards crawl on the walls. Finally, you see a fellow human, but he is badly wounded, clearly breathing his last. Before speaking to him, you glance to the side, and see the probable cause of his demise: a red humanoid, staring back at you with fiery eyes. You speak to the man. Slumping over, he hands you a knife, and makes you the recipient of his last words: kill them, kill them all.
While I haven't played the King's Field games, I have watched a four-hour retrospective on them, which means I am practically an erudite. All jokes aside, I don't think it's unfair to assert that Abyss is clearly trying to dig out its own style, while following in their footsteps. The most obvious of these is the focus on combat. King's Field is an attack button, a magic button, and a whole lot of strafing, STA has a whole lot more than that. You can swing your weapon four different ways, which seems to impact their effectiveness (more on the stats later) and more interestingly lets you target enemy body parts, destroying heads and removing limbs rather than just chipping away at a health bar. It's quite the interesting system, and it's coupled with a few other ones. First off, guns! There's not much to say about how they work, standard FPS fare though with quite the limited ammo supply, but there's a nice bit of resource management with them- with everything, in fact. Every piece of equipment decays when used, from armor to weapons to guns to magic rings, but you can destroy items to heal at certain stations, or repair items using your own HP.
This is all clearly intended to cause a tense gameplay loop along the lines of survival horror games, but as for whether it succeeds... eeh? It's tense, for a bit, but none of these systems ever forced me to make uncomfortable choices. I could always use fairly strong weapons and the best armor without needing to actually use lesser backups, and I kept a reasonable supply of ammo, money and healing potions all the way to the endgame. It's a shame because there's some neat stuff here, but while I did enjoy interfacing with these systems I don't think I actually ever had to. Also, the limb cut system kinds of runs out of ideas for most of the game, chopping off an enemy's head and seeing them stand back up is a memorable moment in the first stage, but it's also the most interesting thing you'll ever do with a limb cut throughout all of Abyss, save for maybe that one level where you have to chop off certain parts to land a lethal blow.
The structure of Shadow Tower Abyss is simple enough. You have a tower you must climb, and to do so you must venture through dangerous zones to unlock its elevators and make it to higher floors. Once you get past the game's esoteric bits, that's all it really boils down to. These levels are... a mixed bag? I really like some of them, like the bug stage where you can get a bit of a glimpse at how their colony works, or the poison swamp area (lol) that you have to purify room by room with pickups you find strewn about it, but most are a lot weaker. Not necessarily frustrating, just mechanically lackluster. They're surprisingly linear and most of their gimmicks don't really amount to much. The waterfall area really just sees you moving slower underwater, the cliffs area has airborne enemies, that kind of stuff. It's weird how it gets simpler as you go, and less engaging as a result.
Shadow Tower Abyss' art direction is possibly its most interesting bit, and what I think earned it a bit of interest in modern times (that and the inherent humor of facing high fantasy enemies with modern day firearms), and yeah, it is quite pretty. It does a lot of interesting stuff with lighting and palette, and even though areas look sort of samey from room to room there is a very memorable visual identity to each of them, especially the hub world, inhabited by odd hunched-over ferrymen who tend to bioluminescent runic technology in massive bone structures that rise up from a black void. I mean, that's just cool. However while I would love to say I was smitten with Abyss' atmosphere (that's really why i played it. Well, that, and guns funny), its lack of soundtrack kinda flattened the whole thing for me. There's some ambiance, but not really an immersive or interesting sort, and I think its great visual presentation is held back as a result.
That's the sum of my thoughts but I wanna touch on just how bizarre this game is, the story is nearly incomprehensible, I think mostly thanks to the fan translation being extremely rough, often to the point of broken english (though I don't think it'd make much more sense without... the ending, in particular, is kind of very lame. I thought it might change depending on your actions but it does not, which is weird because there's several optional areas you get some story content out of), the art as mentioned is often very esoteric and even the mechanics are hard to parse. I mean, just look at the stats. Stamina, ok, Vitality, sure, Strength and Dexterity, I know what those do... Slash, Break and Pierce I can guess... (but are they defense, offense, or both? and does slash boost your horizontal swings and break vertical, or the other way around?) Concentration? Mentality? Mind? Element, Solvent and Spirit? I beat the game and I still couldn't quite tell you how all of this works. All of this summed up together gives STA a very unique feel, like the mechanical equivalent of a liminal space. You know it's leading somewhere, but you have no idea what that somewhere could possibly be. And I dunno, it's interesting. Shadow Tower Abyss isn't a masterpiece, in my opinion, but it is very interesting to think about.
While I haven't played the King's Field games, I have watched a four-hour retrospective on them, which means I am practically an erudite. All jokes aside, I don't think it's unfair to assert that Abyss is clearly trying to dig out its own style, while following in their footsteps. The most obvious of these is the focus on combat. King's Field is an attack button, a magic button, and a whole lot of strafing, STA has a whole lot more than that. You can swing your weapon four different ways, which seems to impact their effectiveness (more on the stats later) and more interestingly lets you target enemy body parts, destroying heads and removing limbs rather than just chipping away at a health bar. It's quite the interesting system, and it's coupled with a few other ones. First off, guns! There's not much to say about how they work, standard FPS fare though with quite the limited ammo supply, but there's a nice bit of resource management with them- with everything, in fact. Every piece of equipment decays when used, from armor to weapons to guns to magic rings, but you can destroy items to heal at certain stations, or repair items using your own HP.
This is all clearly intended to cause a tense gameplay loop along the lines of survival horror games, but as for whether it succeeds... eeh? It's tense, for a bit, but none of these systems ever forced me to make uncomfortable choices. I could always use fairly strong weapons and the best armor without needing to actually use lesser backups, and I kept a reasonable supply of ammo, money and healing potions all the way to the endgame. It's a shame because there's some neat stuff here, but while I did enjoy interfacing with these systems I don't think I actually ever had to. Also, the limb cut system kinds of runs out of ideas for most of the game, chopping off an enemy's head and seeing them stand back up is a memorable moment in the first stage, but it's also the most interesting thing you'll ever do with a limb cut throughout all of Abyss, save for maybe that one level where you have to chop off certain parts to land a lethal blow.
The structure of Shadow Tower Abyss is simple enough. You have a tower you must climb, and to do so you must venture through dangerous zones to unlock its elevators and make it to higher floors. Once you get past the game's esoteric bits, that's all it really boils down to. These levels are... a mixed bag? I really like some of them, like the bug stage where you can get a bit of a glimpse at how their colony works, or the poison swamp area (lol) that you have to purify room by room with pickups you find strewn about it, but most are a lot weaker. Not necessarily frustrating, just mechanically lackluster. They're surprisingly linear and most of their gimmicks don't really amount to much. The waterfall area really just sees you moving slower underwater, the cliffs area has airborne enemies, that kind of stuff. It's weird how it gets simpler as you go, and less engaging as a result.
Shadow Tower Abyss' art direction is possibly its most interesting bit, and what I think earned it a bit of interest in modern times (that and the inherent humor of facing high fantasy enemies with modern day firearms), and yeah, it is quite pretty. It does a lot of interesting stuff with lighting and palette, and even though areas look sort of samey from room to room there is a very memorable visual identity to each of them, especially the hub world, inhabited by odd hunched-over ferrymen who tend to bioluminescent runic technology in massive bone structures that rise up from a black void. I mean, that's just cool. However while I would love to say I was smitten with Abyss' atmosphere (that's really why i played it. Well, that, and guns funny), its lack of soundtrack kinda flattened the whole thing for me. There's some ambiance, but not really an immersive or interesting sort, and I think its great visual presentation is held back as a result.
That's the sum of my thoughts but I wanna touch on just how bizarre this game is, the story is nearly incomprehensible, I think mostly thanks to the fan translation being extremely rough, often to the point of broken english (though I don't think it'd make much more sense without... the ending, in particular, is kind of very lame. I thought it might change depending on your actions but it does not, which is weird because there's several optional areas you get some story content out of), the art as mentioned is often very esoteric and even the mechanics are hard to parse. I mean, just look at the stats. Stamina, ok, Vitality, sure, Strength and Dexterity, I know what those do... Slash, Break and Pierce I can guess... (but are they defense, offense, or both? and does slash boost your horizontal swings and break vertical, or the other way around?) Concentration? Mentality? Mind? Element, Solvent and Spirit? I beat the game and I still couldn't quite tell you how all of this works. All of this summed up together gives STA a very unique feel, like the mechanical equivalent of a liminal space. You know it's leading somewhere, but you have no idea what that somewhere could possibly be. And I dunno, it's interesting. Shadow Tower Abyss isn't a masterpiece, in my opinion, but it is very interesting to think about.
This review contains spoilers
Really great. Foreboding, mysterious. The dismemberment mechanic gives the combat some welcome complexity (Bethesda take notes). One weird thing is that I was getting so much loot at the end of the game that I thought it was the middle of the game. Call me Imelda Marcos for how many shoes I was lugging around.
the Japanese only trails in the sky game equivalent.
holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, why are video games so GOOD
I haven't played any of the other games in the King's Field metaseries (yet). I got here mostly because a lot of people were going around recommending it to everyone who liked Lunacid, last year's really good indie tribute to them. The influence is impossible to miss, but Lunacid is still going for quite a different mood from the source material; Shadow Tower: Abyss is a lot less friendly and nostalgic, and it's even more atmospheric and mysterious--perhaps the most so of any game I've ever played.
It's kind of amazing just how strong of a case it makes for art direction over graphical fidelity, and that's coming from someone who's been playing that tune faithfully for decades. Fromsoft was still dealing in the low budget range in the PS2 era, but even by their standards... let's just say you could show me quite a few screenshots of this game telling me it was on the PS1 before I got suspicious. It's not even like it's a really early PS2 game, 2003 was around the middle of the console's lifespan.
And yet, however angular the models and crispy the textures, and despite its world and inhabitants often being deliberately grotesque, Abyss's overall effect manages to be hauntingly beautiful. The environments are highly varied, but I don't think I'll ever get the sort of main hub area out of my mind. You walk around on earthy platforms suspended high in a vast, pitch-dark cavern, lit neon green by sources clearly neither natural nor manmade, populated by bizarre creatures that just stare at you with obvious distrust and speak to you either in cryptic, just-short-of-hostile sentence fragments or not at all, and all the time you'll periodically hear strange, loud noises that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. Like Jesus CHRIST, guys, leave some cool spooky vibes for literally every other game in the world! There are poor Metroidvanias starving in the Epic Store!
But the enigma of this game goes beyond the aching need to see more of its fucked up world. I finished it, and there are very few questions I could possibly answer about its core RPG mechanics. The controls and UI are, affectionately, riddled with retrojank and nothing in the game explains itself even a little beyond item descriptions that spare maybe five words for the purpose. There's no map aside from the occasional crude one scrawled on a wall, and the level design gets labrynthine. You can full heal by sacrificing a piece of equipment at certain spots, and you repair equipment by sacrificing some of your health at others. There are items I picked up that I never figured out any use for at all. What the hell kind of stat is Solvent? What's the difference between Mind and Mentality? What do these status effects actually do? Okay, you have a carrying weight capacity and if you go over it it slows you down, that's perfectly basic, but I can't seem to drop items so I guess I'm just in slow-mo until I get back to the little shop node and pawn some things off, might as well keep picking up looh my god I'm moving even slower now and TAKING A SHITLOAD OF DAMAGE OVER TIME WHAT--
I'm not usually a "don't use a guide" kind of girl, but seriously, don't try to use a guide. I'm not convinced you'll find one that answers a lot of these questions, anyway. The game is honestly, and surprisingly, not super hard as long as you stock up on healing potions and watch the extremely fragile durability of your gear. You don't need to optimize, and it's more unnerving and intriguing than frustrating to get lost in these levels. Combat is extremely basic aside from a cool dismemberment mechanic (most enemies will not necessarily die if you cut off their heads, fun detail!), but that's because it's not the main draw. The game is also pretty short, maybe a ten hour joint or so.
Play Shadow Tower: Abyss. I can be cagey about actually universally recommending games since my tastes can run to the esoteric and janky, and that's extremely the case here, but I don't think that does anything but enhance the experience. If you have literally any interest in dungeon crawlers or surreal, dark fantasy as a genre or aesthetic, play it. You deserve to give this game a serious try as much as the game deserves to be a household name.
I haven't played any of the other games in the King's Field metaseries (yet). I got here mostly because a lot of people were going around recommending it to everyone who liked Lunacid, last year's really good indie tribute to them. The influence is impossible to miss, but Lunacid is still going for quite a different mood from the source material; Shadow Tower: Abyss is a lot less friendly and nostalgic, and it's even more atmospheric and mysterious--perhaps the most so of any game I've ever played.
It's kind of amazing just how strong of a case it makes for art direction over graphical fidelity, and that's coming from someone who's been playing that tune faithfully for decades. Fromsoft was still dealing in the low budget range in the PS2 era, but even by their standards... let's just say you could show me quite a few screenshots of this game telling me it was on the PS1 before I got suspicious. It's not even like it's a really early PS2 game, 2003 was around the middle of the console's lifespan.
And yet, however angular the models and crispy the textures, and despite its world and inhabitants often being deliberately grotesque, Abyss's overall effect manages to be hauntingly beautiful. The environments are highly varied, but I don't think I'll ever get the sort of main hub area out of my mind. You walk around on earthy platforms suspended high in a vast, pitch-dark cavern, lit neon green by sources clearly neither natural nor manmade, populated by bizarre creatures that just stare at you with obvious distrust and speak to you either in cryptic, just-short-of-hostile sentence fragments or not at all, and all the time you'll periodically hear strange, loud noises that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. Like Jesus CHRIST, guys, leave some cool spooky vibes for literally every other game in the world! There are poor Metroidvanias starving in the Epic Store!
But the enigma of this game goes beyond the aching need to see more of its fucked up world. I finished it, and there are very few questions I could possibly answer about its core RPG mechanics. The controls and UI are, affectionately, riddled with retrojank and nothing in the game explains itself even a little beyond item descriptions that spare maybe five words for the purpose. There's no map aside from the occasional crude one scrawled on a wall, and the level design gets labrynthine. You can full heal by sacrificing a piece of equipment at certain spots, and you repair equipment by sacrificing some of your health at others. There are items I picked up that I never figured out any use for at all. What the hell kind of stat is Solvent? What's the difference between Mind and Mentality? What do these status effects actually do? Okay, you have a carrying weight capacity and if you go over it it slows you down, that's perfectly basic, but I can't seem to drop items so I guess I'm just in slow-mo until I get back to the little shop node and pawn some things off, might as well keep picking up looh my god I'm moving even slower now and TAKING A SHITLOAD OF DAMAGE OVER TIME WHAT--
I'm not usually a "don't use a guide" kind of girl, but seriously, don't try to use a guide. I'm not convinced you'll find one that answers a lot of these questions, anyway. The game is honestly, and surprisingly, not super hard as long as you stock up on healing potions and watch the extremely fragile durability of your gear. You don't need to optimize, and it's more unnerving and intriguing than frustrating to get lost in these levels. Combat is extremely basic aside from a cool dismemberment mechanic (most enemies will not necessarily die if you cut off their heads, fun detail!), but that's because it's not the main draw. The game is also pretty short, maybe a ten hour joint or so.
Play Shadow Tower: Abyss. I can be cagey about actually universally recommending games since my tastes can run to the esoteric and janky, and that's extremely the case here, but I don't think that does anything but enhance the experience. If you have literally any interest in dungeon crawlers or surreal, dark fantasy as a genre or aesthetic, play it. You deserve to give this game a serious try as much as the game deserves to be a household name.
Um clássico inegável, pode ser considerado um ''proto-souls'', sendo uma das obras mais criativas da From até os dias de hoje, Gótico com Ficção Científica, um Dungeon Crawler com Espingarda, provavelmente a coisa mais louca que já saiu dessa empresa.
Esse jogo me impressionou bem mais do que qualquer Dark Souls da vida, é de fato uma obra fora da curva em todos os sentidos, o jogo assusta como nenhum outro jogo da From, não acho tão difícil mas fácil definitivamente não é, criatividade no ápice, sistemas absurdos como o desmembramento de inimigos, os modos de ataque que adicionam um realismo no jogo, difícil apontar defeitos nesse jogo, mas infelizmente imagino que tenha faltado verba, infelizmente muito curto, história descartável e gameplay bem inferior aos jogos da época.
De qualquer modo, mesmo com seus defeitos esse jogo tem um legado importantíssimo, e sinceramente, é até mais interessante do que vários jogos da série Soulsborne
Esse jogo me impressionou bem mais do que qualquer Dark Souls da vida, é de fato uma obra fora da curva em todos os sentidos, o jogo assusta como nenhum outro jogo da From, não acho tão difícil mas fácil definitivamente não é, criatividade no ápice, sistemas absurdos como o desmembramento de inimigos, os modos de ataque que adicionam um realismo no jogo, difícil apontar defeitos nesse jogo, mas infelizmente imagino que tenha faltado verba, infelizmente muito curto, história descartável e gameplay bem inferior aos jogos da época.
De qualquer modo, mesmo com seus defeitos esse jogo tem um legado importantíssimo, e sinceramente, é até mais interessante do que vários jogos da série Soulsborne