Shadows Behind the Throne 2

Summary: Dev abandoned this project, there is a free version, mechanically the same, on the dev's itch.io. Flat out, I don't dislike this game, however the developer has decided to abandon this game whole cloth in favour of working on "Shadows of Forbidden Gods". The reasoning behind this, (in short), straight from the dev's itch.io: "To improve the game, we have to make the hard decision to completely rebuild the core mechanics." and "By restarting the project under a closed-source framework we gain the ability to use 3rd party UI graphics and art to deliver a far more polished product" Finally, there is a free version of this game on the dev's itch.io which is functionally the same game just missing some minor graphical details, such as unit portraits.

Remember "That Which Sleeps" the kickstarter game that promised that you could play as Cthulhu and corrupt the world and a million other things, but then the dev took the money and ran and never delivered. Implausibly Shadows is not only the game that was promised, but it delivers. The graphics are a little off and the interface is a little confusing, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is it fun to corrupt and dismantle several civilizations until eternal winter falls upon the land. There is a lot of room to grow, and here is hoping it keeps growing.

[Note this a re-post of a comment I wrote in the forum upon reading that development on this game was stopped so they could instead "completely rework the core gameplay] for the upcoming sequel. Something they didn't deign to post anywhere more easily seen by, you know, paying customers.] This game is FINISHED? Holy crap I was expecting a LOT more work to be done from what I saw and played. That's very very disappointing. I also like that the dev graciously buried the fact that a complete redesign and a new product is necessary to fix "problems". Problems he otherwise wouldn't have bothered to tell potential customers about. This is a terrible way to run a business, which is, believe it or not, what you're doing when you start commercially selling a product whether you have Valve as your middleman or not.

Great game. It's a bit like Ruinarch, if you've ever played that, except on a strategic level. Lots of variety in the ways you can take down a kingdom. Very replayable and it's right up my alley. That said, it's EXTREMELY rough. As EA as you can get while still being playable. - Kind of a crap, poorly thought out UI. For example, saves are placed in alphabetical order instead of chronological order where your most recent one is at the top. You might have 7 autosaves, and the one you're looking to load is save number 3, halfway down the screen and you have to look at the time to know that's the one you want. I called my manual save aaa, so it will be at the top of the list. That's a small thing, but there are a lot of poorly designed UI functions like that and it impacts the level of information you get from the game. - Some significant bugs. Suddenly you'll be unable to save a game, for whatever reason (you'll know when your autosave craps out), and that's that. You'll have to restart. There's a development log which sort of gets openly written as you play, and the amount of errors on mine is pretty significant. I've had a number of other crashes and errors, too. The constant autosaving has prevented me from losing much, but I wouldn't stake my life on being able to complete a game of this. I'd say you're going to run into a session-ending or game altering bug maybe once every hour or two. - Balance still needs some work. There's about 10 different kinds of agents you can have, and the best 3 are clearly superior to anything else. The worst 2 or 3 are garbage. I'm not one of these suckasses who will never give an EA game a bad review. I expect EA games to work. I support them on the condition that even if the dev abandons them that night, I won't have entirely wasted my money. I'll cut a little slack on bugs or a rough UI, but if it isn't playable and entertaining as soon as I pick it up, it's getting refunded and a thumbs down. What I'm saying is that this recommend is legitimate. Don't be too worried about picking this up.

I'll be forward. I REALLY wish I could recommend this. I hope the 3rd one is FIXED. This game is amazing and 100% my type of game. No matter how small I made the map, or what I did, the game would crash any time I tried saving or it autosaved. I could have refunded, but I like the game enough that I just said "well 8 dollars and got 11 hours out of it...never played barely but I like it..."...but not enough to give it a positive review sadly because the game engine is broken for me when it saves the game. Don't take only my word for it... https://steamcommunity.com/app/1511830/discussions/1/5452154443646136808/ This guy had same issue but at least he could play longer than I did. So this never got fixed.

After That Which Sleeps turned out to be That Which Wasn't (didn't put money on it, just annoyed) it wasn't looking good for the genre of game I never knew I wanted. A civilization-like game where you're not bound by a civilization's rules and borders yourself. Its a genre that doesn't even have many -unfinished- games to show for itself (Infiltration by Gornova, SBTT1,) but now Shadows Behind the Throne 2 is what I will point at to say 'More of this, please.' I like it a lot, for more than just the unique experience***, but it took me a few hours in 3 separate play sessions to tutorialize myself enough to know what to do and start enjoying it consistently. I wanted this niche game to be to my liking even before I bought it. It is a cryptic game with a UI that only a developer can love. Information you need is usually there, but you have to hunt for it. It took me a while to appreciate all the number keys in the world view.) For example the society view that lets you see all the nobles and their relations would be handy to see simultaneously with the election screen or when I've spent my magical power to the negative values, I cannot see the world's temperature because my powers won't display. In SBTT2, you're a disembodied evil trying to take over a world with 200~ turns of pre-rolled history, wars and expansion, splits and civil wars. Your methods range from spawning monsters to affecting the world's weather to just driving societies from one war to another, all the while you try keeping mankind divided and ignorant to your growing threat. Your agents are your pieces moving across the map, weakening and infiltrating cities. All this leaves Evidence, which causes investigating agents to eventually start attacking your units. A country expelling all foreign agents turns the region into a hot stoveplate. No playstyle usually works without another backing its weaknesses, at least not as well, apart from a glaring balance issue with the Unholy Flesh**. I didn't see it in the beginning but every action the nations take from locking down to starting wars to investigating your doings by assigning titles is a two-turn vote taken by the simulated aristocracies of each nation in response to what you or the other nations are doing. Every nation has an average of 6-12 nobles who all have their greatest believed threats listed, their like and dislike for another, their personalities and some smaller things that affect their voting habits. What I love about this game is that it feels like the world, while appearing rudimentary, has depth and a clear cycle to it. It can roll on without your interference, that's in fact its goal. Countries war and defend, conquering until they get too big with too many nobles leading to civil wars and splitting back to smaller rebellions unless there's a greater unifying threat. Most of the time the name of the game is 'who's the biggest threat?' and that isn't meant to be you. The enemy agents try to find evidence, investigate it and deliver it to as many nobles as possible to get the nation to judge your agents. You can kill them, hold them off or enthrall up to a few but they're many, replaceable and you only get one spell each turn. Your agents aren't fighters and the hordes of monsters you create can stomp through a nation or two until a big enough kingdom swoops in armies amassed. This is how its intended by the developer I think, even if it doesn't quite work that way at times**. The player is recommended to play sneaky, scheming like a bastard. So you start by infiltrating a nation's politics, driving their voting to inaction while you spawn monsters. They notice and you create a plague to shift the fears from your monsters to internal issues. Then you manipulate the noble's liking to you through saving them from the plague you started, leveraging newfound political power to then dismiss a rival noble. Now they've survived the gray rot, beasts and outlawed your agents. You forgot to keep your vampire fed. You've now raised the world's awareness making nations paranoid towards all infiltration attempts. Your magic and enthrallments are spent. But you can say it was all part of your plan, because you gained political standing in the largest nation. You can start your plans anew and that on-the-fly scheming is the heart of the game. Someone might not like the idea of the player having no true lose condition but I find it thematically appropriate for cosmic horror. The lightbringer ritual, which is supposed to seal you away for many turns and reset the board works for me as a concept, even if it is a little beta and buggy. As for bugs: I've had a couple. Societies without borders or holds after being absorbed, a few times boosting a noble's fear must've caused the value to go to negatives or something because a noble earlier terrified of my dark agents suddenly considered +190 evidence found in his region to be a modest concern of "Total threat: 9" There's odd AI behavior, especially on merchant npcs... Bugs, UI and all the rough edges aside, I consider it fun. As mentioned earlier**, even if it is a little unbalanced towards finding an uninhabited corner of the world and just making monster nests until you have enough to take on even the biggest empire. For contrast, whilst using politics, especially in large societies the game can feel like being subjected to endless prestige sandbagging and your noble burning out the other noble's liking while trying to get just one step of a war declaration to go the way you want them to. Using the monsters as a subtler tool while focusing on the harder politics is pretty fun, they can work together. So that's the part of the game that I really like. The appearance is another beast entirely. The store page shows the world without the filters, but to keep up with the moving borders and mixing nations between turns (the games are long if you're not using just brute force methods) you're going to keep juggling the nations, provinces, awareness, infiltration and liking masks. The nations mask will change the colors of the sand, snow and trees to bright cyan, neighboring the peppiest yellows and purples and with how dark the game is, this is jarring. When not flashing the disco button actively, you risk losing track of which countries have which cities when their borders fit together like saw's blade. Information is there, but you always have to hunt it. Finally, the music. The guitar tracks didn't woo me at first, yet while a low thrum and a drum beating a heartbeat to some foreboding score would've let me get in the role of looming over a world with evil intentions, I think letting me think unbothered was a smarter choice from the developer. They really grew on me, especially the one with the echoing clock tick / bamboo stick. I've looked at things like the 'mod credits' put under event windows and how the npc face generation seems to allow for players adding their own, additional, not replacing, bits for constructing 'the faces of the enemy.' Seeing what's looking like early integrated mod support and having seen the dev eagerly chat with their player base both on Itch.io as well as here on Steam, I'm not unhappy with my choice to support this game or the next one. ***So to draw this review to a conclusion, TL;DR, Shadows Behind the Throne 2 is a game I recommend to those who saw TWS' KS page and went 'oh, scam or not, that's a cool idea.' If you have interest for this type of a niche game, this is the most fleshed out version I've found of this genre (Ruinarch seems to be focusing on less global, more interpersonal level of interactivity with humanity) and if you can look past a lot of jagged edges, I can in turn recommend it. SBTT3 has already been mentioned by the dev, but this game will do for me, for now.

I've played this game since the release of the first beta over a year ago, and played the prequel before that, and this has got to be one of my favorite indie games. I love the whole concept of playing as the ancient elder evil, and I like that you have a very wide variety of different abilities to use, from washing across humanity with a wave of rotting, demonic flesh, turning kingdoms against each other while you wear them down with plagues and undead hordes, slowly take control of a kingdom and carefully build up its strength before declaring it your dark empire, etc. When I just want something to casually play for an hour in the evening, this is my go to because of how quickly I can start up a new game and start building evil fish people cults. 10/10 would corrupt again

Can't be played on ultrawide, game can't handle any aspect ratio that's not 16:9. Usually I would just switch to windowed mode but even there the game will hide certain text and UI elements behind the top bar.

The creator outright abandoned this game in an unfinished state in favour of starting to work on its more expensive sequel. Joke's on him, because I wouldn't play anything he makes ever again even if I got the game for free. That's just low.

I've played this game for far more than my steam hours show. If you're someone who was looking forward to That Which Sleeps, than this is the game for you. If you're looking for more information on the game, there is a manual, and the game developer has a few youtube videos that can assist you too, which I will put as a link below. [spoiler] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFnC_BrcXXbukAuEVLRJ7sg[/spoiler]