From Shadows is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
This is a particularly badly made platformer, the best part is the graphics and they're not great. First and foremost it's worth mentioning that this is a bit of a bug riddled mess where you glitch, fall through the floor, and generally have a really bad time. The werewolf/vampire theme seemed like a great idea but even great ideas can't flourish when coupled with apallingly bad technical implementations.
The game features simple, fairly basic 2D visuals, and while some effort went into them, and they don't look bad exactly, they don't look great, either. In the 3D era of gaming, that kicked off in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D GPUs like the S3 Virge and ATI Rage, phoning in the graphics like this isn't going to win any awards or appeal to enthusiast PC gamers.
Bewilderingly, while the game includes proper audio controls, [b]they don't work!![/b] So you can't turn off the annoying game audio (it's not very good), you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the game sounds using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to bother testing this basic feature.
The controls and game handling are notably very floaty and imprecise. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing or polish done.
Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. From Shadows has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for starting the first level, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality game this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
From Shadows is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
