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.

This might become my favorite game by From Software. The atmosphere and aesthetics in this game are top tier. It manaages to create a truly alien feeling world that you don't belong in. A dream like qulaity that feels like a location your mind creates in a vivid dream that sticks with you for years. A game that looks and feels like it wouldn't be real. Someone said to me "it looks like something posted on the "games that don't exist" twitter account." and I 100% agree.

The ending is the weakest part of this game. It has me torn between rating this game a 5 like i want to and a 4.5 because the final "area" is a wet fart compared to everything else.

Highly recommend playing it

We Came From the Abyss

Allow me to take you back. To a time when Fromsoft, despite their rather expansive catalogue of games, were but a small curiosity outside of Japan known almost exclusively for their mecha combat series Armored Core. Back to 2003. To a time before Dark souls, and Demon Souls. Before Miyazaki. Before George R R Martin.

Enter Shadow Tower Abyss.

A game steeped in mystery, and having never left Japan, sadly allowed to fall in to near obscurity.

But a game that undoubtedly sowed the seeds of what was to come.

How did we end up in a place like this

All the staples we know and love are here; A gloomy, melancholic world that defies natural logic, seemingly frozen in time. Beautiful but hostile locales haunted by all manner of strange creatures and wayward souls, in equal parts majestic and horrific. Intricately designed looping hallways and corridors with unlockable shortcuts that expertly mark progression. A permeating sense of hopelessness. Tragic characters who meet sad and unjust ends. Obtuse, underplayed storytelling shrouded in intrigue. Messages scribbled on walls warning you of dangers yet to come. Illusory walls that hide secrets and hidden paths. Death traps that'll send you back to the title screen within minutes of loading up the game. Weapons and loot to pillage besides the resting corpses of fallen warriors. And lest we forget to mention; the infamous poisonous swamps. Ladies and gentlemen, this is page 1 from the Souls playbook (or 2 if we're counting Kings Field, which we obviously should).

But whereas the Souls titles only grew in size, Shadow Tower: Abyss is smaller by design, more restrained and intricate. You will get to know these locations intimately by the time you've finished ascending each and every distinct and varied floor of the 'Shadow Tower', inching ever closer towards the top. From subterranean forests and icy caverns, to the rot infested wastes of alien civilisations, signposted with strange moving platforms and monolithic structures, the first person perspective adds wholesale to the immersion, in turn creating a sense of claustrophobia and confinement lacking in the subsequent entries. This shift in camera perspective lends itself perfectly to the close quarters encounters, making you witness the horrors up close and personally, even allowing you to dismember and maim foes with a swing of your sword if aimed right. Roaming these strange winding hallways filled me with a sense of loneliness, dread and unease that I haven't really felt since playing Konami's Silent Hill 4: The Room.

And why are we even here, exactly? What is our goal, in this strange, forgotten and cursed land? Outside a vague notion of acquiring some ancient, hidden power, I'm not sure even our nameless protagonist knows. All we can be sure of for certain, is reaching our destination.

Will you survive, or die trying?

There are no checkpoints to be found, nor tutorials. Save points are few and far between. Traversing the labyrinthian corridors requires you to pay keen attention to your surroundings, as they're littered with pitfalls and traps designed to slow your progress. Although daunting at first, thankfully no area really outstays its welcome for too long and the game moves you along at a relatively brisk pace, so long as you're observant and resourceful. You're encouraged to map things out, take mental notes and rely on recognising landmarks to progress, as naturally there's no menu map or waypoints to be found. Different entry and exit points allow you to explore the various zones mostly in your order of choice, and if you're stuck, there's often another area off the beaten path to focus your attention on, to level up and find gear, before looping back round to where you were previously. It feels tightly designed and satisfying.

Enemies offer a challenge, especially in the early game, but none will stop you in your tracks or fully halt your progress unlike certain roadblocks encountered in the later titles. Weapons and armour are doled out generously, but are prone to degrade and break rapidly if overused. The game walks a fine line between difficulty and fairness- nothing felt cheap in my time playing, but caution and problem solving are pre-requisite to success. Should I push deeper in to the level to hopefully find that next save point, or spend time retracing my steps to heal and repair my gear first? Shout out to whoever came up with the idea of having to sacrifice your HP to repair broken gear, and vice versa- it's purely masochistic in design and brings with it a real sense of risk/reward as you're not always sure what's more important in the moment. And you can't just rely solely on combat skills alone to brute force your way through, as some areas demand solving actual puzzles to progress, which seems to be a sorely lacking aspect of Fromsoft's more recent titles.

And if that isn't entirely your bag, did I mention there are guns in this game? Like, literal fucking Uzis and Grenade launchers.

In Summary

I hope that Fromsoft eventually decide to revisit this series in some form, if not a direct continuation (which is highly unlikely at this point), at the very least dare to return to its first person perspective and its slower, more methodical and weighty combat. For all their merits, and there are many, their later games have become a bit bloated and have started to lean too heavily on fast paced action, dodge rolling and frustratingly difficult boss battles, which in my opinion is not the reason these games are so compelling. A title that strips things back a bit, and better balances their unrivalled atmospheric design with more of an emphasis on puzzle solving as opposed to just killing increasingly difficult enemies, would do wonders in helping me to stay immersed in their worlds.

And if not? Well, I still have all the Kings Field games left to play through...

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.

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

Dropped at moving platform area, too much for my zoomer brain to handle ig

Incredible atmosphere with a decent variety of enemies, nice level designs and a great amount of freedom when it comes to making your own build. It is a bit slow but that is only a problem when fighting flying enemies, those fucking blow..

Solid tho :P

FromSoftware.

Obtuse, quirky, obscure masterpiece as usual from this legendary studio and from the most amazing, thriving, experimental and interesting era of videogames ever to exist (IMHO). I didn't know there was a recent translated Novel based on this game, so I'm already on it to continue my journey.

1337.

An excerpt from the tragically unpublished Shadow Tower Abyss tie-in novel, translated to English for the first time:
"...I plunged further into the labyrinth, through the shimmering limestone walls, where troglodytic cyclopean beasts kept counsel, but even they were cowed by the nightmarish bellows that reverberated up from the deeper reaches of the tower. A deft sword hand and heavy plate armour kept me alive, barely, as I cut my way through inscrutable rooms and hallways, which seemed to have no other purpose than to confound me, as if an ancient prophet-architect foresaw my progress and took it as an insult. Sometimes, I felt that the creatures of this place were as lost and afraid as I was, their masks of madness seemed to slip, and I saw my own quiet desperation reflected in them, but to see oneself in horrors wrought flesh inspires only deeper hatred, my blade never once hesitated.

I wandered at length, doubled and tripled back on myself, and the passage of time was measured only in the dwindling of my supplies. I did not sleep. Eventually I came to a pillared hall, great enough that it's ceiling disappeared into the gloom, the doors were cast open, and I stepped inside. The now familiar roar echoed throughout, the great doors suddenly shut, and the ferocious denizens set upon me in droves, I exhausted myself against wave after wave, nameless limb severed from nameless beast. I thought that was to be my end, that I would be consumed and all that marked my passing would be whatever the creatures could not digest. But at long last, after wearying battle, a way opened before me. This was only a bitter relief however; the deeper terror called again and with it, a message came unbidden to my mind, an invitation to match power against the lord of this forgotten hall.

With notched sword and rent armor I resolved to face this challenge, despite my great weariness I pressed on through the darkness, and came to a throne room. Face to face at last with the beast that so frightened even the creatures of such a place, it looked like a lion, only far too large, with a burnt and tattered mane, and a face possessed of wicked and alien intelligence. The monster was lounging on a smooth limestone pedestal, girdled by stalagmites, and as it cast it's malevolent gaze upon me it reared itself up to its full height, towering over me, the look on its face told me that I had been sized up as a play thing, inferior in both might and sorcery.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! My Ruger Blackhawk revolver roared to life, 6 rounds of 158 Grain, Jacketed Hollow Point .357 Magnum tore 6 holes through the beast and left it crumpled on the floor. I blew the curling smoke from the barrel of my pistol. "Your face, your ass, what's the difference?" I announced, as I spun the pistol round my finger and returned it to it's holster."