Get ready to giggle your tentacles off. Shadows Over Loathing by Asymmetric Games is here with another silly action role playing game in their Loathing series. Now set to the theme of Lovecraft’s Eldritch Horrors, Shadows Over Loathing parodies the mysticism to mind-melting oblivion. Hold on to your riveted trash pants, eat a galactic hotdog, and get ready to be dunked into a bucket of laughs.
The Loathing series is probably the silliest writing I’ve ever seen in a video game. Shadows Over Loathing is full of wacky circumstances, witty quips, and overall goofiness. If you look up a dictionary of silly words, Shadows will have it written somewhere in the game. The main storyline starts with the adventurous you as you go visit your Uncle Murray and his shop of wonders on Plunkett Street. Upon arriving, and all your luggage suddenly catching fire, you find that Murray has been missing for some time. Just before Murray disappeared he figured out a way to find and alleviate cursed items. The hunt for Murray falls to the wayside as you hunt for these various cursed objects, typically having to perform ridiculous side quests and tasks. Soon you start confronting a great evil and powerful inter-dimensional account set on wrecking you with misfortune. It is only you who can stop the tear in the fabric of reality and save the day (and probably find your Uncle Murray).
Shadows Over Loathing is a standard bookkeeping role playing game where you manage various stats and equipment to help you accomplish various tasks. The gameplay can be split into a few categories: exploration, puzzles, and battling. Shadows Over Loathing’s maps start basically blank (note, these maps are very bad maps, some full of holes like a slice of swiss cheese), and you must traverse blindly through the map to get random encounters. Most of the encounters perform a side quest or involve battling, but sometimes they involve the main quest. Exploring in a level is similar to exploring the overworld, where you’re searching for various objects that can help aid you. Some levels involve puzzles, which are graded as a pass or fail. You can skip whole features of the game if you answer incorrectly or perform certain actions. Other puzzles can be unusually tricky and difficult to master.
A main feature of Shadows Over Loathing is the battle system. At the beginning of the game you’re given a choice of three different character traits, which benefit you in various ways. As a Jazz Agent, I had a lot of Moxie, which allowed me to influence others better and use musical instruments as weapons. What Shadows Over Loathing adds to its previous game is a helping creature (known as a “familiar” in some role playing games) that aids you in every battle. These can help in healing you, attacking enemies, and soaking up enemy attacks. You are also greeted by various allies throughout, each with their own kind of characteristics. What’s great about the battle system is how nothing is obscured. You can see how each enemy decides to attack and determine the best order of actions to properly take them down.
While Shadows Over Loathing is a near-perfectly constructed parody game, it does come with some flaws. Traversing through doorways can be frustrating. There are some moments where you’re trying to walk around an object only to accidentally walk through a door on the near or far side of the level. The hit boxes and invisible walls appear to be bigger than necessary. There were also a few glitches where some of my Battle Actions didn’t trigger the Action Points, so I was able to use them again. All of the text in Shadows Over Loathing leads to some goofy punchline, but some of this text can drag on for too long. If you click through dialog and see paragraphs of text appear, your eyes start to glaze over and the meaning of the rambling story is lost. The story feels unbalanced and padded out in some parts. Because most side quests appear randomly, there were some maps where I had no side quests and some where it was filled to the brim. The rambling of the text creates a story that becomes a chore to follow, and nearing the end of the game you become anxious as you scroll through more mounds of text.
Even though everything in Shadows of Loathing is sloppily drawn like doodles in a notebook, the art is straightforward and easy to understand. While the theming is on point, the user interface and anything that involves text (the game has A LOT of text) is easy to read and it’s very easy to know how to control the gameplay with the button prompts that are always on the screen. The art is simple, but the abundance of text allows the user to create their own imagery of what’s happening. Part of me wishes I could see what pants and shoes I’m wearing, but I understand that’s making the character design too complicated. Leaving the character as a simple stick figure with a goofy expression and silly hat allows the different animations to be performed easily. The charm comes from the goofy walks, demeanor, and battle actions.
A slapstick comedy needs a great variety of sounds, and Shadows Over Loathing is in no short supply. The shoes in the game do nothing but provide different sounds as you walk around (or change how your character walks). My favorite shoes are the birkenglocks, which twinkle and chime. I was surprised by how dynamic the music and audio was. Playing as the Jazz Agent, I was really testing the extensiveness of the audio. Some battle moves call for a flute, which plays along to the backing track once you cue the action. The birkenglocks play along with the jazz playing in the bar. All these little touches with game audio creates a pleasing environment that can easily go unnoticed due to how well it blends in with the theme.
In summary: Shadows Over Loathing is a fun gameplay with very minor glitches and a lot of reading to wade through, but reading that is enjoyable nonetheless. Art and audio blend seamlessly into the doodle theme and create a fully realized parody game.
Jordan played Shadows Over Loathing on the Nintendo Switch with a key provided by the developer. The game is also available on PC.
