Indie Game of the Week 434: Shadows of Adam

Shadows of Adam is a throwback 16-bit RPG, of the type that typically use the tools of the RPG Maker software as a foundation and builds something semi-original on top of it. It follows a group of youths from the titular town of Adam, which is at its wit's end due to the encroachment of an enchanted forest of thorns it calls The Tangle, as they embark on a journey to investigate the source of a power once thought to have been all but lost from the world: magic. Asrael, your companion, is one of the few mages still left and is deeply distrusted as a result—one of the reasons you leave Adam early on is so the villagers don't stone the poor woman to death after growing too superstitious about The Tangle's origins—and you end up moving from town to dungeon to town again after one misadventure or another, pursuing the mysterious ghost that resembles the protagonist's father. It's otherwise a pretty typical example of what its genre, with turn-based battles and a party of permanent characters who have their own strengths and weaknesses in combat. If I had to specify a reason why it made a convincing case for itself, it's mostly because it's a 2017 game and I've a weird relationship with games from that year.

As with many throwbacks, Shadows of Adam takes bits and ideas from multiple sources to create that nostalgic familiarity without being too overtly based on any one retro antecedent, though if I had to point to one game it reminded me of the most it'd be Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Now, that was sort of a surprise to me given the reputation of that game—one I semi-explored when I wrote about its RetroAchievements set a little while ago—but FFMQ had some really ahead-of-its-time quality-of-life touches that sort of got lost in the furor about its overall lack of challenge. Hard to make a case for a game needing convenience features when it was already accommodating to a fault, after all. Shadows of Adam makes use of one of its more notable mechanics: that all enemy encounters are visible on the field and don't move around, allowing you to prepare and fight them at your leisure, while still insisting on these encounters due to the way they would be sitting on bottlenecks between you and either the critical path or a beguiling treasure chest. These encounters typically then vanish for the entire dungeon run afterwards, only respawning should you decide to leave and come back.

The similarity pretty much ends there though, as most of Shadows of Adam's combat encounters can be pretty tough even with all the best gear money can buy. Enemies hit hard enough that you're often considering your strongest attacks out of the gate, wiping them out in as short as time as possible despite the cost of overusing your strongest moves before they can do the same to you. Your special moves, which allow for spells of different elements, multiple target attacks, and a number of buffs and heals, run off a resource that quickly regenerates either when you defeat an enemy, complete a combat encounter, or spend a turn on a passive skill that typically also buffs your attack or defense stat. It's a combat system that encourages using all your strongest skills regularly rather than holding back for bosses, since you probably won't survive long enough to reach them if you're too conservative, though the downside is that most battles tend to be pretty similar after a while since you're stuck with the same crew with the same selection of special moves throughout the game. The only aspect that tends to change things up is what elements the enemies are weak to, and the monk character Curtis can quickly determine that with one of his moves so you're not left trying to experiment with all the types you have as they clobber you. As I often point out, Zeboyd long ago managed to figure out how to make these 16-bit RPG throwback combat systems more dynamic by tweaking the formula, if only slightly, with every battle due to how quickly your party would level up or switch out members. Then again, we're probably talking a 15-20 hour RPG at most here rather than some 40+ hour thing where that repetition would be a much bigger issue.

Shadows of Adam is a perfectly competent game. The pixel art's pretty good for its enemy character sprites in battles (and I like that they follow the FFMQ thing of having smaller, cuter sprites represent those encounters in dungeons), the music's catchy enough if unremarkable, the script has its moments of darkness and levity alike with stalwart protagonist Kellan often being the butt of the joke due to how earnest and guileless he is, and though the combat gets repetitive after a while it does maintain a decent difficulty curve throughout that ensures you're not just hitting the regular attack constantly to quickly resolve most battles while also eliminating random encounters that might otherwise ruin your concentration while you explore or are in the process of deciphering some manner of environmental puzzle. The UI isn't great—RPG Maker doesn't look too sharp when you fullscreen it—but it's not like you have a sphere grid or license board to worry about. Very bare-bones stuff when it comes to character customization/development, to the extent that new abilities are mandated by level milestones, and you're only allowed one accessory slot in addition to the armor and weapons with incremental improvements that are found in stores and in special purple-tinted chests inside dungeons (which are usually a little trickier to find). In terms of complexity it's probably closer to 8-bit than 16-bit.

I'm not going to say the modest charms of Shadows of Adam can compete with the more elaborate and envelope-pushing attempts to come out of the Indie space recently, like Chained Echoes or Sea of Stars, but it's certainly more engaging and demonstrates more ingenuity than most of its RPG Maker-derived kin. Furthermore, I'm always happy to find an obscure 2017 game that could potentially break its way into what's become an unusually competitive top 100 GOTY, if only because it feeds into my obsession about how crazy a year that truly was. I'll stick with it at least until the end of August, since I can't really argue that it puts a foot wrong either; maybe it's more the case that because it's so beholden to following the genre's pioneers that it leaves no footprints of its own behind in the sand.

(Correction: Shadows of Adam was made in HTML5, not RPG Maker, according to the devs. Sorry about that.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Shadows of Adam remained entirely adequate right up to the end. I did like how many of the tracks in the final dungeons sounded a lot like their FFMQ equivalents, at least initially, suggesting the connection between the two games was more than deliberate. The final dungeon was about three times longer than it needed to be, but I'd have to condemn every other JRPG for making that choice too, so although I added on an enervated note I'll credit the game in ensuring the challenge curve never wavered much and the final boss was a real nuisance with his heals and last-minute buffs. While this game didn't impress me too much overall I've had it brought to my attention that they made more, with the experience of making this game no doubt a launching point for more ambitious follow-ups, so I might way to those as well someday. For as much as I grouse about this genre and its more grindy foibles it's still a thing I have no small amount of affection for, and if nothing else these meticulous throwbacks let me know that I'm certainly not alone in that regard.