One of the rare few times I've gotten decently far in a game, pretty close to an endgame in some senses, and just kind of put my head in my hands & said "no, I don't think so, fuck this I'm out". It's a shame too, since despite a lot of jank & awkwardness there was a lot I did like about the presentation & ideas present in Shadow Complex. I like the really unique setting for a Metroidvania that isn't fantasy or high concept sci-fi, more of a hi-tech Tom Clancy/"gadget-y secret society dad thriller" vibe complete with cheesy voice acting & a cartoonish plot. I also liked the much more visible way you gain abilities throughout this, going from just some dude hiking with a flashlight to a super-soldier with a sonic speed dash. The difficulty is fairly balanced as well, so I think the progression handles well.

However, once you really start to sink some hours into this the cracks & the irritants start to grow. The huge, overarching dilemma with this game is one of the worst Metroidvania maps I've seen, and I've played a decent amount. There's no shortcut system, so if you have an objective on the other end of the map or somewhere without an easy line to get to then you have to waste ungodly amounts of time hiking back & forth. I appreciate that the save rooms are more checkpoints you can blow past to autosave, but some of the traversal in this is infuriating mixed with the sometimes jittery controls & the bizarre 2.5D that makes it hard to shoot enemies in the background or understand depth.

The locating of secrets too is also fiddly & bizarre, with some hidden in ways that are poorly explained or lots of quick death traps that just serve as time sinks. So many areas that require crawling through areas that is slow even when holding the dash, and just everything in this adds up to waste time where it shouldn't. I really really wanted to finish this, but as someone who really does take games casually for the most part I just did not want to waste any more time with a clunky game.

I started off vibing with this one but unfortunately, the game just kept wearing me down until I didn't give a shit by the end.

The mechanics of what you can and can't do are often not explained correctly, bosses have terrible checkpoints and in general the backtracking in this feels really bad. That last part is definitely a huge issue that persists for the entire game.

Shadow Complex also does this really annoying thing where every time you open a path, that path will be closed the next time you go there. It makes it really hard to keep track of where I am and just adds to the tedium.

Big disappointement.