Unshaded Reviews

I'll update this as I go, but basically, a top-down stealth game that may not be super polished but has plenty of challenge and encourages high-skill play, with some endearingly eurojank cutscenes and animated avatars that actually aren't bad to look at. I'm not sure how sharp the learning curve is but it doesn't seem that unforgiving so far (~30 missions or so), but it very barely holds your hand through it; e.g. if you mess up tossing a bomb at a target generator, you'll have to restart if you don't have enough, but most of the early levels are fairly short. How item storage works is a bit quirky, as you get some upon completing missions a lot of the time but I think you can also grab new ones in the missions themselves whenever you play and finish them. The hunters are quite a curveball when you first run into them, and you have to learn how they work the hard way if you're not lucky. It's an interesting game as far as being something I haven't played of its type much before.

I could practically HEAR the camera begging to be player-controlled, with its erratic zooming in and out. However, if you can get past this glaring issue, Unshaded has a fantastic stealth experience to offer. The game really opens up once you've unlocked the first couple of skills. I loved using the 'grapple knife' to snatch enemies off patrol and into the shadows where I could quietly finish them off. I also enjoyed later missions where more challenging foes appeared, like the Hunters, who have no set patrol paths and are very difficult to kill. Acquiring new suits makes it possible to have bigger inventories, be less visible in the shadows or even turn enemies to ash when killed, and I had a great time in particular with the last one. In each mission, you can kill everyone or no-one, use a range of gadgets to sneak past, disable or destroy your foes (both organic and robotic) and complete basic objectives. The general flavour is search-and-destroy. If you're clever, you can use combinations of chain-kills and golden pick-ups to build score multipliers, while remaining undetected. I had a good time figuring each level out, but 100 missions with very similar environments and objectives is probably more than most people could want. While combat is a thing, the emphasis is definitely on stealth. If you get spotted by multiple enemies, it's usually certain death. It's a flawed game, but you can tell Unshaded was built with a lot of care for presentation. All the weapons are very satisfying to use; the sound design is excellent and the animations really sell the grisliness of each kill. Again, I recommend the game, as long as you know the camera is a bit of a mess. You'll need to get used to relying on the UI indicators to understand when enemies are closing in.

Well designed and soft gameplay, not really struggling player to piss off, I played Pixel Shinobi and for an one man developer such an admirable effort, waiting for the next titles. Keep it up Ametist.

Its a shame this game seems be so underground, at least from judging the amount of reviews. This game has some of the best stealth action I've seen since Mark of the Ninja. There's so many interesting tools to abilities and the AI acts pretty dynamically so as a result you can have levels play out in different ways even if you use the same tools. When you get in the zone it's really fun to rack up a high combo and pull off moves you'd see in some anime action scene. My only criticism is that the game feels a bit bloated with 100 levels, I had to take a break for a few months before completing the second half of the game. Things will start to feel samey and repetitive even with the dynamic AI and tools. I do appreciate that we got 100 levels, I think it would be better if some of those levels were moved to a bonus level section so the pacing of the main story feels better.