The Consuming Shadow, A spoiler free review

The consuming shadow is a project spearheaded entirely by Ben Croshaw, better know by his nickname Yahtzee, creator of the show zero punctuation on The Escapist. Before I begin, I should mention that I have long been a fan of Yahtzee work though I will try to remain as objective as possible.

Apparently Scotland was spared from the shadow

The Consuming Shadow takes place in an alternate version modern England that is under attack by an otherworld being attempting to invade the world within a 60 hour time limit. Your job is find out which of the so called gods is invading, and discover the banishment ritual to prevent the invasion. This requires you to drive to towns claimed by the shadow, and fight all manner of fearsome creatures to find clues that allow you find out which god is invading, and the correct runes to banish it. You then go through a dungeon from one of 5 archetypes (garden, office building, wear house tenement housing, or residential building) completing an objective that will allow you to gather information that will allow you to banish the correct god.

My character needs a better flashlight

The main meat of the game consists of entering dungeons, and fighting Lovecraft inspired monsters. The game punishes you for running from enemies by lowering your sanity, so learning patterns of your enemies is important. Ammo is annoyingly limited (most likely because this game is set in the UK and not the USA) so you will need to rely on pistol wiping the tar out of the fleshy sacks of awfulness you encounter.

But is it scary? The black text on red background and mysterious runes in the background promises several stained undergarments. The answer sort of, the consuming shadow is more unnerving that it is scary. The game has several ways that it messes with it's the player when your characters sanity bar drops low (and it will), effects such as illusionary enemies, causing your character to go invisible, and suddenly swapping options you are choosing from to a "kill yourself" button will occur. This along with the dark tone of the game, creates a sense of dread and uneasiness similar to venturing into a public restroom that is a departure from a standard jump scare riddled horror game.

One click in and there already is a kill yourself button

The main strength of the game is in it's writing everything from the text messages you receive in your car, to the random events, and the description of towns you are about to enter all add to the games atmosphere. There are also journal pages that you can
recover in the dungeons that give some back story to the game and are a gripping read.

The main weakness of the game is in its presentation, while this is, for the most part, a one man project most of the other indy games on the market look much better than The Consuming Shadow. Also, the controls for keyboard and mouse are difficult to get used to, I recommend a controller since the controls are nonrebindable.

If you are looking for a game with a unique experience and are in to Lovecraftian style horror then The Consuming Shadow is for you. Even as someone who doesn't like Horror games I still enjoyed it, and would recommend it to anyone who finds the concept to be interesting.