Schatte ～The Witch and the Fake Shadow～ / 魔女と偽りの影 Reviews

I have to admit that it was better than expected. So, we have: - sexy shadow play - some story - decent characters - good controls - not so great camera work - smooth animations - different enemies - interesting level designs It could see some improvements, but this will lead to an unnecessary increase in production costs. All in all, a very good little game. Well, for Unity anyway. Oh, also remember that sometimes you can get stuck. I was forced to replay levels (100 times). Don't wait too long for an enemy to approach where it shouldn't be.

they should add voice actor for this game, but its fun tho n cheap exceed my expectation

The way game controls is awful and the Camera is a headache. I'd avoid this one really. but to each their own. it has some nice elements I like, like the art and a few other things but not enough for me to recommend it.

[i]Note: So far I only played 4 of the presumably 7 chapters.[/i] [i]Schatte ～The Witch and the Fake Shadow～[/i] is by no means a must-play title, and there are a lot better games out there. But I'd say it's alright, it has some interesting and unique mechanics, and I enjoyed it so far, aside from some initial needless frustration. The story is simple: The Shadow Demon had been sealed away, but eventually broke free, and now takes control of animate beings. For some reason, Schatte, the main character, is unaffected. As a wielder of shadow magic, she heads out to help survivors, and to stop the contamination. To use shadow magic, Schatte needs to generate a shadow first. She can do this by positioning her familiar, a bat with a jack o'lantern head that emits light. She can then interact with shadows in several ways to stun a target, stabilize a movable object, cure a possessed creature, control a creature to borrow its abilities, or dive into the shadow of an object to either climb slopes, or to pass unharmed through obstacles. The game itself is fairly linear, and a level mostly consists of walking from the start point to an unspecified target location, while fighting possessed creatures, or solving puzzles with different kinds of shadow magic. There are some optional collectible objects in the form of journey entries or other documents, but they are usually easy to find. Once you have figured out the basic mechanics, most fights so far are rather straightforward: Lock the light source to the enemy, throw a Shadow Knife into its shadow to stun it, then jump once or more on its shadow to cure it. Things become slightly more difficult when confronting multiple enemies at the same time, and there was at least one considerably more difficult boss fight. But since Schatte gains experience / levels, there's no reason to be concerned about a too high difficulty. The puzzles are usually simple, but it still can take a while or some experimentation to find the solution. What I didn't like about the game: [list][*]There's no options menu, except for the unity dialog at launch, which at least allows to choose a resolution / quality setting, and look up / change the controls. [*]Many parts of the first levels look very bland. But it gets better later. [*]Maybe it's just me, but at the beginning I had a hard time understanding some of the basic mechanics. In particular, I didn't understand which terms refer to buttons / keys (e.g. [i]Shadow Stamp[/i]), and which terms refer to actions associated with those (e.g. [i]Shadow Bind[/i]), and that I was supposed to tap a certain button / key. [*]There's only a single save state, and the game automatically saves at certain points. That means if you accidentally select [i]Start[/i] instead of [i]Continue[/i] in the main menu, you have to play certain parts of the game again. While there is a Chapter select option, it doesn't allow to select single levels within this chapter, and you cannot return to the main menu once you have entered this sub-menu; so if you select this, you either have to replay the whole chapter, or force-quit the game (I haven't tried this, so do this at your own risk!) Fortunately, character level and collectibles are not reset when replaying a chapter. [*]You can die at a certain part in the tutorial level [b]before[/b] the game saves for the first time. This can easily happen if you didn't understand some of the instructions, and when this happens you have to replay the whole tutorial with the not-completely-skippable dialogs.[/list] While those issues can lead to some initial frustration, the game plays fine once you know how to deal with those / are familiar with the basic mechanics. All in all, I'd recommend the game if... [list][*]...you're looking for a small relaxing indie game with a witch theme, and some unique mechanics [*]...you don't mind the lack of sound options, or in-game graphics / control settings [*]...you are confident in your ability to navigate menues w/o accidentally selecting options that reset some of your level progress [*]...you can handle some potential initial frustration (ymmv, maybe I just didn't pay enough attention) [*]...you don't need achievements or trading cards[/list]

A decently good game albeit way too easy and simple. An extremely important note is that the default controls (for a controller), are quite bad. You may have to edit them using the unity launcher config (disable steam input temporarily if you have an xb360 controller). This game is alot more fun with better working controls.