Ereban: Shadow Legacy Review – Way Of Shadow
In what feels like a spiritual successor to 2016’s Aragami, Ereban: Shadow Legacy transforms you into a deadly shadow that can become one with the darkness–the ultimate stealth operative. The game doesn’t quite deliver the necessary challenge to make for a successful stealth game, however, as the first trick you learn will get you through the entire game without a hitch. It does far better on the platforming front, and though its cast of characters could have used some fleshing out, the futuristic sci-fi world they inhabit is cultivated with colorful sights and intriguing snippets of lore.
As its name implies, Shadow Legacy’s main gimmick is its use of shadows. You play as Ayana, the last of the titular Ereban, a people who possess the innate ability to become one with and manipulate shadows. Using her shadow merge ability, Ayana can sink into shadows to creep past enemies, slink up walls, and dispose of bodies, encouraging you to stick to the shadows where your toolbelt is at its strongest. Alongside these shadow abilities, Ayana has an assortment of advanced gadgets–some are always useful like a recon pulse that marks enemies and items through walls, while others are more situational like mines that stun targets–which work regardless of the lighting situation.
I initially thought that this would present plenty of opportunities and strategies to sneak past enemies, most of whom will take out Ayana in a single hit. There’s a healthy variety of foes who want to take her down–standard enemies don’t pose much threat beyond the flashlight they carry to take away your darkness, but the more adept snipers can spot you from afar and the stealthy droids who can go invisible can ruin your day if you’re not taking time to look for the telltale shimmer. And then there are the human enemies who present a moral quandary rather than a gameplay one–while the mechanical droid-like enemies that dominate each level can be killed with impunity, murdering the living and breathing human workers will negatively impact Ayana’s morality and others’ perception of her (which I’ll touch on a bit more later).
Unfortunately, Ayana’s natural ability to merge into the shadows and traverse unseen is very powerful–so powerful, in fact, that you don’t really need to rely on anything else. The enemies aren’t very smart either, so they’re easy to avoid even if you solely rely on shadow merge. This means that it’s actually quite easy to go through the entire game without being seen or resorting to lethally cutting down humans, making for a stealth game that doesn’t quite give you enough opposition to challenge you to think critically when it comes to circumnavigating a threat. There aren’t any difficulty settings to make the enemies smarter or more plentiful either–though you can adjust how many environmental guides show up in each level (purple lamps or purple paint that point you in the general direction you have to go, for example).
Shadow Legacy teases you with a tantalizing view of what it could be in its third chapter, briefly breaking free from its otherwise linear stealth levels to give you a playground in which you can tackle an assortment of missions in any order within an open area. Within this open space, you have more of a choice in how you approach each assignment instead of being funneled through a more linear challenge. Mistakes have a more drastic impact because you’re not moving from one area to the next–it’s all one big connected location, where your actions can snowball into unintended effects. Ayana’s assortment of abilities and gadgets also have way more utility in this level. The binoculars used for scouting and mapping enemy movements are way more valuable in a giant open space than in an enclosed laboratory or city street, for instance. The game never opts for this format again, however, and in doing so it leaves me wishing for what might have been.
To the game’s credit, the back half of Shadow Legacy has some creative set pieces from a platforming standpoint, with one section in particular that I adored for how well it challenged and encouraged me to utilize all I had learned up to that point in one fast-paced gauntlet. Shadow merge can be used to eject out of shadows to make otherwise impossible jumps or interact with the environment to solve simple riddles–skills that apply to challenges that steadily get more complex as the game goes on. Even if Shadow Legacy falls short of being a great stealth game, it’s a good platformer. The environmental elements create an assortment of shadows–some oddly shaped, others that move, and still more that can be altered–and figuring out how to reach an out-of-the-way platform is sometimes a puzzle within itself, made trickier and more rewarding to solve given the stamina meter tied to Ayana’s shadow merge. Not only do you have to figure out which shadows to move or follow or jump between, but you also usually have to do it in a timely manner.
In service of these platforming challenges, Shadow Legacy features a colorful diversity of locales, ranging from an outpost in the desert to an autonomous factory. My favorite is an urban street that hints at the human life that once populated it, now devoid of any movement save for the autonomous drones that patrol the streets and promise that this is for the best. Sporadic graffiti and text logs hint at the growing loss of autonomy among the human citizens leading up to the corporate takeover that promised everyone a better life. It’s such an eerie level, framed against the setting sun that’s causing the street to slowly be encroached by shadow. It feels fitting that Ayana uses those same shadows to sneak her way past the guards searching for her, paralleling how the oppressive regime’s efforts can’t stop the resistance–they squeezed so much life out of this one city block that now there’s no living soul to report Ayana to the authorities, just dumb, easily-fooled machines.
Guiding Ayana through these challenges is a story that never quite gets room to breathe. Initially trapped by an AI-controlled entity hellbent on using her powers for some unknown purpose, Ayana finds herself quickly working with the resistance seeking to free themselves from corporate tyranny. Ayana is hesitant to work with them, having heard they’re nothing more than terrorists but agrees to use her unique skillset to help on the condition that the group gives her everything they know about the Ereban people. There are some interesting, albeit familiar, narrative themes here, but Shadow Legacy rushes through them–Ayana buys into the resistance’s cause remarkably quickly, for example, despite being given no catalyst to do so.
In the game’s third chapter, Ayana is warned to spare humans so as to help alleviate the accusations that the members of the resistance are terrorists. This is the game’s morality system, shifting the coloring of Ayana’s design toward shining white or sinister purple depending on how bloodthirsty you play her. As far as I can tell, the ramifications of this only impact one small moment in the final level of the game–it’s not much of a narrative payoff.
At certain points in the story, Ayana can upgrade her shadow powers and you have a choice of whether to unlock new branches on one of two skill trees. One branch leans toward non-lethal abilities, like cushioning your footsteps, while the other opts for skills that make you a better killer, like making it easier to hide bodies so your deeds aren’t discovered. This creates some fun replayability as it’s impossible to fully unlock both branches in a single playthrough, but, again, shadow merge is just too strong. The new powers are cool, but I never had to use them, as shadow merge makes it fairly easy to sneak through a level without being spotted. Granted, I opted for a nonlethal run. It’s possible that if I had aimed for a playthrough where I killed everything that moved, I’d have needed to rely on more of the powers that hide bodies or kill multiple enemies at a time in order to not alert guards that something was wrong.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy sits in a weird place for me. As a stealth game, it rarely challenged me, reducing protagonist Ayana into a one-trick pony that could sneak past any target with the same shadow merge skill every time. But as a platformer, Shadow Legacy incorporates some entertaining puzzles that grow increasingly complex and rewarding to overcome. I never quite managed to connect to Ayana’s journey against the autonomous overlords planning to doom an entire civilization, but I had a lot of fun slinking up walls and exploding out of the darkness, striving to time my jumps with the movement of a windmill and the rotating shadow it was casting. Those nail-biting moments are the ones that stuck with me, not the dozenth time I slunk past an unsuspecting droid.
Fortnite – A Grassy Island In The Center Of Everything Location
Fortnite‘s latest Snapshot Quests, also known as story challenges, are live in the game, and a few of them are trickier than you may be used to as of late. If you need to know where to find the location referred to when Cerberus says he left a chew toy “on a grassy island in the center of everything,” we have your solution here.
On a grassy island in the center of everything in Fortnite
Each of these Cerberus chew toys you’ll be finding for this week’s snapshots require you to head to landmarks across the island, then dig up the toy. The nice thing to note is that once you get to the right spot, you’ll receive a marker for where to dig, so you won’t have to guess so long as you’ve arrived in the correct location.
For this one, you’ll want to head to the lake southeast of Restored Reels. However, there are two small (and seemingly grassy) islands there, and in a firefight, it may be annoying to head to the wrong one and fail to complete your quest. For this challenge, you’ll want to head to the smaller and more eastern island of the two there. We’ve marked it on the map below.
Once you arrive, hit the marker with your pickaxe to dig up the “chew toy” and you’ll have completed one of three related challenges. We also have guides on where to find the chew toy near the snow where people bury yummy bones and the one under the windmill with a view of the Styx. You can even find them all in one spot by using our Cerberus Snapshot gallery.
Fortnite – Under The Windmill With A View Of The Styx Location
Fortnite‘s latest Snapshot Quests, also known as story challenges, are live in the game, and a few of them are trickier than you may be used to as of late. If you need to know where to find the location referred to when Cerberus says he left a chew toy “under the windmill with a view of the Styx,” we have your solution here.
Under the windmill with a view of the Styx in Fortnite
Each of these Cerberus chew toys you’ll be finding for this week’s snapshots require you to head to landmarks across the island, then dig up the toy. The nice thing to note is that once you get to the right spot, you’ll receive a marker for where to dig, so you won’t have to guess so long as you’ve arrived in the correct location.
For this one, you’ll want to head to the red windmill northeast of Grim Gate–hence how it overlooks to river Styx, known in Greek mythology to be the entryway to the underworld, Hades. We’ve marked it on the map below, so you don’t get it confused with The Other Windmill–and yes, that’s the actual landmark name of the island’s identical windmill more to the south.
Once you arrive, hit the marker with your pickaxe to dig up the “chew toy” and you’ll have completed one of three related challenges. We also have guides on where to find the chew toy at the grassy island in the center of everything and the one near the snow where people bury yummy bones. You can even find them all in one spot by using our Cerberus Snapshot gallery.
Somebody Once Told Me Shrek Forever After Is Coming To 4K Blu-Ray
The world might be ready to roll you, but you don’t need to be the sharpest tool in the shed to appreciate a good Shrek movie. Shrek Forever After fits that bill, and for the first time, it’s getting a 4K Blu-ray release. Preorders for the fourth Shrek film are now live ahead of its release in June.
In case you missed it when it first came out, Shrek Forever After pits the surly ogre against Rumpelstiltskin. After he makes a deal with the magical being, Shrek’s entire history is rewritten and he has only 24 hours to assemble his gang and restore the original timeline. The only problem? Only Shrek remembers his past. Donkey can’t remember his best friend, Fiona has become the warrior princess of a tribe of ogres, and Puss in Boots really needs to go on a diet.
For bonus features, there’s quite a bit here to enjoy after the end credits have rolled. You’ll get deleted scenes, documentaries, a look at the technology behind Shrek, commentary tracks, and much more. Like most Blu-ray releases, this version comes with a standard Blu-ray disc and a digital copy of the film. The other Shrek movies are also available on Blu-ray, and in case you’re looking to assemble a jolly green collection, these can be purchased individually or in bundle deals.
For more Blu-ray deals, preorders for 4K Blu-rays of Team America: World Police and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut have just gone live. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s films are definitely not for kids, as these puppet action and animated movies held nothing back to earn their infamous R-ratings.
Review Roundup For Stellar Blade
Developer Shift Up’s Stellar Blade is right around the corner, introducing itself as a character-action game in a sci-fi story starring Eve, a human arriving in a futuristic depiction of Earth filled with all sorts of monsters to take down. If you tend to pay more attention to combat set pieces than story beats, this is a game that should be on your radar.
Available as a PS5 exclusive, Stellar Blade will have you facing increasingly dangerous threats while investing points into large skill trees. Fights often demand precision and lots of parrying, with boss fights in particular being quite memorable in the smackdown they offer. It also has quite a lengthy campaign with side quests and hidden corners to wander off to.
Reviewer Imran Khan wrote in GameSpot’s Stellar Blade review that he “came away from Stellar Blade having enjoyed the game quite a bit despite its foibles on the back of its incredibly strong systems. That its biggest weakness is that its tribulations can go on too long is perhaps praise from another perspective not my own.”
GameSpot also has a preorder guide for PS5 for the upcoming action-RPG:
- Game: Stellar Blade
- Platform: PS5
- Developer: Shift Up
- Release Date: April 26
- Price: $70 for the Standard Edition, $80 for the Deluxe Edition
Check out more reviews for the game below:
IGN — 7/10
“Stellar Blade is great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre.” — Mitchell Saltzman [Full review]
VG247 — 4/5
“Stellar Blade, ultimately, is a pleasant surprise. It is a better action game than I expected, with better art, audio, and action than I had hoped for. As far as first attempts at making an action game go it’s a damn good effort. I don’t know what Shift Up’s sale expectations are for Stellar Blade – the part of my brain that reads video game industry news on the regular is worried that they’ll compare the income they get from Nikke to the profits they’ll make from Stellar Blade and decide it’s not worth it. I hope they decide against that. There is gold in these hills.” — Connor Makar [Full review]
VGC — 4/5
“Stellar Blade is a visual treat throughout, boasting glistening sci-fi environments and pleasingly detailed mechanical enemy and humanoid character designs. While much has been made of the lecherous male gaze underpinning EVE’s design – a fact made worse every time you unlock a more revealing costume – the pervy perspective feels more embarrassing rather than offensive, a cringe-worthy bid to capture the fanservice-loving anime crowd.” — Tom Regan [Full review]
Inverse — 8/10
“Looking back at my time with Stellar Blade, I believe it has the potential to turn into a franchise instead of just a one off deal. There is still a good deal of story to tell involving Mother Sphere, potentially even a prequel so we can see how things got so bad on Earth in the first place. With Stellar Blade being just the second game from this South Korean studio, the future looks incredibly bright.” — Brandon Hofer [Full review]
Game Informer — 8.75/10
“The further I played into Stellar Blade, the more it surprised me with the depth of its action and the breadth of play experiences. The story never clicked for me, but the world-building, top-notch art, and silky animation certainly did. Even when certain devastating bosses made me curse, it was always because I made a mistake and was left eager to dive back in for another shot. I loved the gradual mastery I developed as I explored its many interlocking systems of combos and special moves. Stellar Blade is unabashed in its titillating approach to sex and violence, but unlike so many games that use those appeals as a crutch, it’s also a top-notch action experience that can easily stand with the big girls.” — Matt Miller [Full review]
Fortnite – Near The Snow Where People Bury Yummy Bones Location
Fortnite‘s latest Snapshot Quests, also known as story challenges, are live in the game, and a few of them are trickier than you may be used to as of late. If you need to know where to find the location referred to when Cerberus says he left a chew toy “near the snow where people bury yummy bones,” we have your solution here.
Near the snow where people bury yummy bones in Fortnite
Each of these Cerberus chew toys you’ll be finding for this week’s snapshots require you to head to landmarks across the island, then dig up the toy. The nice thing to note is that once you get to the right spot, you’ll receive a marker for where to dig, so you won’t have to guess so long as you’ve arrived in the correct location.
For this one, you’ll want to head to the graveyard southeast of Lavish Lair. We’ve marked it on the map below.
Once you arrive, hit the marker with your pickaxe to dig up the “chew toy” and you’ll have completed one of three related challenges. We also have guides on where to find the chew toy at the grassy island in the center of everything and the one under the windmill with a view of the Styx. You can even find them all in one spot by using our Cerberus Snapshot gallery.
Another Crab’s Treasure Review – Shellden Ring
To stand out as a Souls-like these days, a game needs to either reach similar heights as the genre’s namesake when it comes to gameplay, or have a compelling new spin on the genre. While Another Crab’s Treasure gets close on the combat front, its excellent 3D platforming are what help distinguish it. Combining those gameplay elements with a genuine, if perhaps slow to start, story about a crab named Kril, who starts as a loner just wanting to get his shell back and go home, but instead finds a greater understanding of the vast ocean, makes for a fun take on the genre.
The game kicks off with Kril’s shell being repossessed as a tax by a wealthy monarch, but this setup is mainly used as an excuse to send him on a treasure hunt across the ocean. Kril’s story during Another Crab’s Treasure is a particularly strong aspect of the game. While initially framed as a tale about Kril breaking out of his routine and finding renewed purpose, it eventually tackles the ocean’s ongoing pollution problems, taking the narrative to a place that is bleak yet also genuine. Where Kril finds himself by the end isn’t one of those overdone happy endings, but instead a far more complicated place that feels true to some of the game’s more dour themes.
The game is broken up into large levels, filled with both enemies and platforming challenges, that you need to explore to find an objective, such as a piece of a treasure map, or reach a far-off structure. The levels are well-designed, with combat and platforming flowing together seamlessly. There are a few places where the brutality of Another Crab’s Treasure does overdo it–such as during platforming sections overlooked by ranged enemies–which results in unwelcome difficulty spikes. Trying to navigate these areas while not getting blown up by ranged attacks that take away a third of your health goes from difficult to frustrating, but this only happens in a handful of instances.
Another Crab’s Treasure provides very little guidance in these open levels. There is no objective marker, nor a place where you can see what your current objective is at a glance. The only direction comes from cutscenes in which characters explain your next goal, or by speaking to characters in the level, which is fine most of the time. However, there were a few instances where something as simple as seeing the current objective would have saved a headache.
In the factory area, for example, you can find a puzzle that leads to the next section of the map, and while you can interact with it if you find it early, you can’t actually solve it. But, because I couldn’t check my current objective, it wasn’t clear that I needed to head elsewhere. Another puzzle has you use a magnet for platforming. Naturally, a metal shell is required to do this, but you also have to hold the block button for it to activate, which a nearby NPC takes joy in not telling you, a reflection of the aloof characterization of characters found throughout Another Crab’s Treasure, although it loses some charm here due to the frustration of unclear mechanics. These small hiccups take away from level design that is otherwise strong overall and typically guides you without the need for objective markers.
The platforming, however, sings thanks to a simplistic approach. You have a limited toolset that enables you to grapple between points, hover jump over perilous falls, and climb nets, all of which are introduced early in the adventure. The platforming challenges instead come from the addition of increasingly tricky obstacles and length of the platforming sections, with the demands building alongside your own platforming skill. There is also some nice leeway when it comes to platforming, as falling only takes a chunk of health instead of instantly killing you, providing just enough of a safety net that you aren’t forced to take it slow and can instead let the movement really build momentum. There were a few instances of objects in the environment catching or stopping my movement in a way that felt unintentional, but it wasn’t a prevalent issue.
Where Kril finds himself by the end isn’t one of those overdone happy endings, but instead a far more complicated place that feels true to some of the game’s more dour themes
The combat should feel familiar for anyone who has played one of these hard 3D action games. It has mechanical mainstays, such as dodges, blocks, and parries, but where Another Crab’s Treasure distinguishes itself is through the use of shells. Since Kril has lost his shell, he can use miscellaneous objects found throughout the ocean as a replacement, so he’s able to equip anything from soda cans to sushi rolls and even party poppers. Each shell has its own defense value and other various stats, like increased physical or skill damage, along with a special move that you can use in combat. These special moves can be a projectile attack, like the fizz from a soda can, or a status effect like an electrically charged can, which deals damage when you get hit. Crucially, these shells break frequently, forcing you to adapt based on which shells are available nearby.
Each shell has an armor meter of various sizes, which is reduced each time you block or take damage. Unless you unlock and execute the parry, your shell will always take damage during combat and break. This extra layer adds some depth to the combat, forcing you to always be on the lookout for a fresh shell when exploring levels. Even if you really like a shell, it’s only temporarily available to you, forcing you to adapt and keeping you from becoming complacent. Not being able to lock myself into a specific build let me experience far more of the options at my disposal, which kept combat fresh over the dozen hours it took to beat Another Crab’s Treasure. While you can insure a shell later in the game to guarantee you will respawn with it, this option comes late enough–and is expensive enough–that it doesn’t disrupt the dynamic or become a crutch yet also feels like a welcome option when it arrives.
Another Crab’s Treasure falls short during fights against tougher enemies and bosses. While mistakes can be incredibly costly in games like this, here they are more often than not fatal. Missing a block can easily get you stuck in an enemy’s attack string, and with tougher enemies, you can almost never take more than two hits without dying. This resulted in losing many, many fights because of one mistake. Losing because you didn’t execute a single block or parry can be extremely frustrating, especially the third or fourth time it happens against the same boss. The vast majority of my deaths came with most of my heals unused, because I lost all of my health without the opportunity to remedy the error. While generally the challenge in the game comes from there only being a little room for error, there are plenty of fights that feel like there is no room for error in a way that is unfair and frustrating.
Another Crab’s Treasure also has multiple instances of unnecessary friction when it comes to quality-of-life features. New skills can only be learned by fast traveling to a specific place, instead of just at any checkpoint, putting multiple loading screens between unlocking a new skill and getting back to the action. There is trash to collect throughout the game that can be sold for additional microplastics (the equivalent of XP), but instead of being able to quickly use these items, you are once again required to fast travel to a specific location to cash them in. The skills vendor and junk vendor are also in different areas, so doing both at once takes even longer.
While not everything in Another Crab’s Treasure is as smooth as it should be, and some unforgiving enemies take away from the joy of the intense combat, the game is a solid take on the Souls-like genre nevertheless. It brings in fresh ideas with the shell system and a focus on platforming–traditionally an afterthought in the genre. And while Kril’s journey takes an act or two to find its footing, the places it goes make the ocean worth exploring.