The Shrouded Isle. All Discussions. Oct 25, 2017 @ 3:43pm Never midn I both found it and added it to the wiki. Morbid is a mortal sin in the Fervor category. Aug 04, 2017 Stephanie Chan @sweijuchan August 4, 2017 6:00 AM The Shrouded Isle is the third release from the four-person indie studio Kitfox Games.
The Shrouded Isle is the third release from the four-person indie studio Kitfox Games. It has a moody gothic look and an equally grim premise that takes inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft novellas such as The Shadow over Innsmouth. As often happens in Lovecraftian lore, the town in The Shrouded Isle is beholden to a cruel and unforgiving eldritch horror. Your role as the high priest is to appease the god Chernobog through seasonal sacrifices and inquisitions. This is a game where you stare into the abyss and the abyss turns out to be a slog through just another day of running a cult.
Shrouded Isle Endings
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What you’ll like
Doom-‘n’-gloom chic
Sure, these folks are oppressed by a fickle elder god who understands no mercy and has zero sympathy for human suffering — but, hey, on the bright side, they’ve got a trendy medieval gothic look going on! I heard that’s in this summer.
The default color scheme is a sickly bile-yellow, and though you can switch, the others are all monochromatic and equally dismal, which hammers home how bleak and hopeless everything is for the ill-fated villagers. Some of the art and the portraits of different characters also have a cool aesthetic, reminding me of broody graphite drawings, and the background music is appropriately ominous. All in all, there’s a ton of atmosphere that’s done very well.
Life ain’t easy for a cult leader
At the start of the game, you’re three years away from Chernobog’s inauspicious return, which means you have to survive 12 seasons. At the start of each season, you select an adviser from each of the five houses in the village. Once it’s over, you have to sacrifice one of them to slake Chernobog’s thirst for blood, suffering, destruction, mayhem, yadda yadda.
This can be tricky, because the bulk of the gameplay is balancing how each of the houses feels about your leadership as well as different attributes for the village. Each house specializes in one of the attributes: ignorance, fervor, discipline, penitence, and obedience. And every adviser has their own virtues and vices that can either add to the attributes or subtract. If the attributes drop too low, then you lose control of the village; if you sacrifice too many people from one house, then the house rebels and you die.
The interesting part is that you’re supposed to feel bad about your decisions, but then eventually you get pulled into playing a numbers game. I felt pretty gross about burning books and murdering scholars, but I had to do it in order to win. Sometimes I also got stuck sacrificing people for minor vices instead of major ones. Was it the villager’s fault that he was stubborn? No, I just had to fulfill a quota for the season.
The Shrouded Isle emerged from a game jam with the theme “you are the monster,” and it does a great job at making you feel like a horrible person. And then you get used to how horrible you are, and you realize how terrible your decisions are all over again.
What you won’t like
Wince and repeat
There’s a lot of repetition without the feeling of progression. Each of the characters has a little one-liner about them when you hover over their portraits, but it doesn’t actually impact your decisions about whether or not to sacrifice them. You never really learn more about them. Each person’s vice or virtue is also randomly generated, sometimes unrealistically so. At one point, I found someone whose virtue would raise obedience … and whose vice was disobedience.
The system reduces the characters to a set of stats. This is cohesive thematically, but it doesn’t really make for very fun gameplay. After my third play-through or so, it started feeling humdrum. I’d try to figure out each adviser’s vices or virtues, select them, sacrifice them, hunt down randomly generated sinners for Chernobog, and then repeat once the next season starts.
Not enough to do
Occasionally, an in-game event occurs. In one event, for instance, a young man is washed ashore, and if you choose to interrogate him, he gives you more details about the outside world. However, that was the only event of its kind that I saw; all the other ones only served to either increase an attribute or win you one house’s favor over another’s.
I wish there was more plot or that we learned more about the world, the village, and how it came to worship Chernobog. Instead, the game slavishly sticks to the numbers game, and everything else just feels like flavor text. This would be okay, except there isn’t that much flavor text either.
Conclusion
I appreciate that The Shrouded Isle isn’t supposed to be all about fun. After all, it’s all about being in a murder cult that trades in ignorance and absolute obedience. Once the initial shock of sacrificing people for minor offenses wears off, though, I really just want to know more. It was frustrating when at the end there wasn’t that much pay-off.
It’s a stylish game centered around an interesting moral dilemma. However, there just isn’t enough world-building to hammer the point home.
Score: 60/100
The Shrouded Isle comes out on Steam for PC on August 4. Kitfox Games sent us a code for this review.
Kitfox Games’s The Shrouded Isle is a stylish cult simulator, and its new DLC Sunken Sins adds even more eldritch horrors. It’s out now on PC as a free update.
Sunken Sins adds a few elements that improve the overall game. Though I enjoyed the original title, I found the gameplay to be somewhat tedious, particularly when it came to seeking information. As the leader of an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired cult, you must appease your dread god by encouraging “virtues” in your followers such as ignorance and absolute obedience each season. The god will also request specific sacrifices, such as asking that you execute the artist or “the cowardly one.”
Between seasons, you investigate the characters and decide who you’ll select based on which stats you need to beef up. Someone who’s curious, for instance, will drop your ignorance stat so you may opt to not use them — or you may choose them for the express purpose of sacrificing them. If any of your stats remain below the acceptable threshold for two seasons in a row, you’ll instantly lose the game.
Sunken Sins enables you to specifically investigate someone’s virtue or vice. Before, you could randomly discover one or the other. It also enables you to inquire after people’s vices mid-season to weed out folks who will harm your standing with the monstrous deity you worship.
“A common piece of feedback from players was that they wanted more depth and control over information discovery. To address this, we overhauled the inquiry mechanic,” said The Shrouded Isle’s lead designer Jongwoo Kim. “This change not only allows players to focus on their interests (e.g., discover a major sinner), but adds a risk-reward dynamic to inquiries because over-investigating a house will lead to its rebellion.”
The new mechanic doesn’t come without its costs. You also have to make sure the five houses under your control don’t rebel, which can happen when they become dissatisfied with your rule. This can happen if you investigate their members too often — or, as in the original game, if you sacrifice someone from their house two seasons in a row.
In addition to improving the inquiry system as well as adding little graphical tweaks like subtle animation, Kitfox has also added a new mechanic: The Tower. The villagers occasionally fall ill to a strange madness that pervades the town, and you must lock them up in the Tower for examination and purification. It can feel like a risky move, because then that particular character is out of commission for possibly several seasons.
Shrouded Isle Wiki
And sometimes they’ll come back changed into eerie creatures called the Awoken.
“We decided early on that the ocean should be the unifying theme for the DLC,” said Kim. “Since we wanted a new structure in the village, we chose to add an abandoned tower that the player can use to ‘purify’ villagers with sea water. As for the Awoken, we wanted to depict the villagers transforming into fish-like monstrosities, similar to Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
Daoc Shrouded Isles
Kitfox doesn’t plan on creating any new DLC at the time, and developed Sunken Sins mainly based on player feedback. Kim says that the response has been much more positive than the team expected. And for those who haven’t had a chance to check out The Shrouded Isle, the DLC brings improvements that may make it easier to give it a try.