The Consuming Shadow Review

Yahtzee is usually known for shooting his mouth off at machine gun speeds every week on his show, Zero Punctuation, but what few people know about him is that he has a more creative side. Not only does he tear into games on a weekly basis, he's created his own for over a decade. One would hope Yahtzee's creations are of high quality: if you verbally destroy videogames for a living, the ones you make yourself better live up to expectations. He's not had that problem in the past: The Arthur Yahtzee Trilogy and Chzo Mythos, both point-and-click series, are well-loved and have a cult following, but his new title is a departure, genre-wise.

The Consuming Shadow is a horror game set up to be just as grandiose a game as Yahtzee's previous work, but this time, the action is framed as part-roguelike, part-visual novel. Players will spend the game exploring England and Wales, visiting vaguely-British-sounding towns in order to find dungeons bustling with monsters, shoring up supplies from back-street dealers to conquer those dungeons, defending individual towns from attacks, and providing intel to those who need it.

The game is set up with an instantly engaging story, where a shadow looming over England/Wales looks to infect everyone in the country, turning them into monsters. You have sixty hours as the lead character (there are three others to play as) to reverse the effects, but of course, it's not just as simple as that. The onslaught is being caused by one of five gods, and using clues collected from dungeons, you have to figure out which one did it, like a game of omnipresent Cluedo. To vanquish them, you have to use runes relating to the gods in a very specific (and randomly generated on each playthrough) pattern at a shrine in Stonehenge. Get it right, you save the world. Get it wrong, and very, very bad things will happen. A story based on gods gives the game a massive and portentous feel, and the time mechanic is absolutely inspired – those 60 hours tick away in real time within the game, so the pressure builds as you get closer and closer to zero hour, creating a taut sense of fear and apprehension that heightens the horror at play.

What really sells The Consuming Shadow is the genuine creeping horror that pervades the game. Yahtzee doesn't care for most games, but as fans know, he has fond memories of Silent Hill 2, and it's easy to see the “less-is-more” style inspiration in The Consuming Shadow’s atmosphere. The roguelike sections are presented in 2D, and everything that moves (you and the monsters) are presented in silhouette. The music is very, very light, relying on foreboding minimalist piano work, and static, which will send shivers down your spine faster than being on a steady adrenaline drip. It creates genuine screaming terror to the point where you don't want to stay anywhere; get in, get what you need, and get out, running for your life. This is what makes The Consuming Shadow brilliant as a horror game – the constant feeling of dread.

What will also cause dread, however, is the massive difficulty: The Consuming Shadow is rock hard and has no pretensions about it. To solve the mystery of which god is behind the plague, and which runes need to be used requires finding every piece of information in every possible dungeon, and there's no let-up. You have, predictably, very limited ammo and low health, and the chance of getting swarmed by enemies is high. Couple in the fact that you also have to manage your sanity level (leaving a room in the dungeon with enemies alive cause it to fall, get it low enough and suicide becomes an option) and the exercise leaves you having to juggle more balls than Jenna Jameson. Yet, this is the good kind of difficulty that doesn't result in thrown keyboards. Sure, you'll die a lot in the beginning, forcing the game to start from scratch, but it'll only leave you hungrier to finish it. In that way, it's much like a retro title, where the fun and longevity of the game doesn't come at face value (Super Mario Bros. can be beaten in eight minutes), instead coming from simply mastering the game.

In this, The Consuming Shadow is massive in terms of scope and depth, extending far beyond the normal game time initially offered here. For instance, players can gain experience points during single runs of the game, which translates to stat boosters that can be used over and over, which makes the game a lot easier as you gain levels. There is also a massive collection aspect at play: rooting around in a dungeon's cupboards doesn't just give you hints, but items for your bestiary and diary, which are huge, and deserve to be completed to get the full sense of the narrative.

There's also some genuinely great writing on display, which is always wonderful to see in a video game. Yahtzee's prior games were point-and-clicks which won awards for the narrative web they weaved, and he's also a twice-published novelist - one would expect quality in the writing of The Consuming Shadow, and it delivers. There are some genuinely horrific sections on offer, such as "We know where your children sleep. They will be eaten first. Greased and spit roasted alive as they howl for their father.". That tense atmosphere gets all the more thicker, and your hairs will stand on end a little bit faster thanks to the penetrating nature of the written sections, which are, basically, one big masterful headfuck.

All the neat little touches in this game really bring it together and sell it. If your sanity meter gets low enough, any options that appear on screen will be briefly replaced with “kill yourself”, which leads to a mini game where you have to click at a high-fire rate to stop the gun reaching your mouth (essentially a “Press X to Not Die” gimmick – fans of Zero Punctuation should enjoy the irony of that one, unless it was totally meant to be parody). When things get hairy in regards to your own sanity, your current objective will flash and be replaced with the likes of “helpmehelpmehelpme” or “ithurtsithurtsithurts”. Got low sanity? No problem, you can take illegal drugs to offset it for a while. A town is about to be raptured? You can either drop what you're doing and save them or let the little sods choke while you tour England looking for gods. All of this gives a lot of meat to the game. Truly, The Consuming Shadow is a joy to sink your teeth into.