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.