Shadows Remain is an episodic augmented reality thriller developed by the same creators who brought us the popular Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride games. It’s a story-driven puzzle game where you play as a mother who attempts to rescue her son from a dark evil force.
Shadows Remain Gameplay
Shadows Remain is an ARKit game like anything I’ve experienced before. It actually reminded me the opening scene of the game The Last of Us. You start the game in a room where everything looks normal and casual, and a moment later the story takes a strong shift and things start changing for the worse.
The game takes place inside a house where the user gets to see a top-down slice through of it and interact with it. Because it’s an AR game, you can obviously move the camera in the 3D space to take a look at objects in close range. In fact, the game actually encourages the player to do that as part of the gameplay mechanic. It’s a puzzle game in its core that invites the player to search for objects and solve optical illusion puzzles to continue to unravel the story.
Shifting perspective is nothing new in Augmented Reality. I’ve experienced in many other ARKit games, including PuzzlAR World Tour, ARise, Splitter Critters, AMON and even while playing the game M.A.S.C AR. The optical illusion implementation was done so good here. I actually spent 20 minutes trying to solve one of those perspective based puzzles.
Halfbrick, the developer, has done an incredible job in delivering a captivating thriller AR experience. The graphics, the lighting (the lighting is amazing in this game!), the visual effects, and the sounds are amazing in this game and this definitely helps to create an atmospheric environment with mystery and help to keep the tension going throughout the game. I was less convinced by the voice acting and the narrated text, but it wasn’t too bad either. I don’t know, it just didn’t sound reliable for a mother to react as she did seeing that her son is gone. I obviously don’t expect a Hollywood level scripting and performance here either.
The room design is very impressive. I really enjoyed moving my iPad’s camera inside the different rooms and check out the objects in close details. The room size isn’t large, it’s about 0.5×0.5 meters in size, quite small. You can also rotate the room using swipe motion so you won’t have to physically move your body to the other side to check the back side of the room. The use of great lighting effects really helps to create a very enigmatic and atmospheric effect that drives the player deep into the story and beautifully complement the narrated story and produce a great thrilling viewing experience.
As I mentioned earlier, the gameplay is evolved around finding glowing objects in the room and solving perspective based puzzles. Although the puzzles are not too hard, I was stuck in some of them for quite a long time. I won’t reveal where because I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let’s say that some of the puzzles require some exploration and paying attention to fine details.
After you finished puzzles in one room, you move to another room. Each room has its own unique designs, clues, and puzzles to solve. If you find it hard to solve puzzles, the game will give you a hit after a few minutes of gameplay if it sees that you are stuck and can’t progress. Don’t worry it’s just some helpful tips to help you progress, it won’t solve the puzzles for you.
Shadows Remain AR Experience
As mentioned earlier, I never play an AR game like this before. I actually tried one game that took place in a large virtual room, but the experience was so bad that I just stopped playing it and moved on. This time I did stay and enjoyed the experience. I think the things that captivated me the most are the story’s mystery component of the game, the gorgeous lighting effects, and the sound effects.
I think I would have enjoyed playing this game way better in virtual reality or maybe having the stage larger so I can feel that I am inside it. That being said, the gameplay itself was built around changing angles and moving the phone’s camera around the environment, and it’s easier to do when you view the scene in a small size as an observer from the top.
The perspective puzzle elements were well done and I did enjoy it for the same reason I enjoyed it in AMON because it’s fun shifting position and seeing an object from in front of view when you see it in a different perspective. That being said, I did enjoy it better in AMON because the scene was much larger and the puzzle pieces of the statues were even taller than I was. Here, the rooms are very small and the pieces of the puzzles are even smaller so the puzzle-solving experience is less immersive and therefore less fun in comparison.
I also didn’t like the object searching part, I actually don’t like it in games in general and prefer smarter more brain-teasing puzzles. I remember playing a detective mobile games like Detective Agency, Detectives: Hidden Objects and others, and at least there are tons of objects in the scene so it felt more challanging. If I am in the mood of playing games where I need to locate objects, I would prefer playing hide and seek games like AR Hide and Seek Virtual City or AR Treasure Run.
I think that Halfbrick Studios try to take different elements from different popular games and combine it into a single story-based AR experience. Of course, nothing’s wrong with that, and the game indeed employs some of the more interesting gameplay mechanics and visuals that we’ve seen in other popular AR and other non-AR games. I just think that the game design is less attractive in AR and because of the small level size, the perspective-based puzzles were less immersive and fun to do compared to other ARKIt titles that I’ve played before.
Episodic Game
Shadows Remain: AR Thriller is an episodic game. I’ve played only the first chapter which was quite short. I guess you can finish it in about an hour and a half maybe less. The game includes a Chapter 2 survey that asks the player what price and amount of the player prefer getting in the next chapter.
Overall, this AR thriller is very short but at the same time, it’s also free. I don’t mind episodic games as long as they keep me hooked and want to come back for more, same like in a good TV series. The thing is that you don’t know the exact date that you are going to experience the next chapter, whether in a TV series you do. Sometimes I just tend to forget about the app and move on. There are so many AR games out there and so many coming soon that I am not sure that I will even remember this game until then. It was a very good experience, but not something that makes me excited about waiting for the next chapter to arrive.
Conclusion
Shadows Remain: AR Thriller is a good AR Thriller puzzle game. The game has beautiful graphics, great music, and captivating sound effects. The story is short and kind of unclear even after finishing the first episode, but I guess this was done deliberately to keep you want to wait for the upcoming episode.
The AR experience was good but felt somewhat lacking in the perspective-based puzzle part. Shadows Remain felt like a game that tried to be many things but somewhat fails to deliver a great AR experience as a whole.
That being said, there is no AR game like that and it was certainly very refreshing to try out a different type of ARKit game for a change. The puzzle-solving experience wasn’t hard but it might I’m sure some of you will get stuck in some of the puzzles like I did. I liked the perspective-based puzzles, although I prefer playing them in large size, there are clever and done really well, I just wish there was more of them.
Overall, a very good AR thriller experience combined with a fun puzzle-solving experience—definetely recommended!
P.S. I think there is a bug in this game. I can’t play the first episode all over again. When I press Continue, it just shows me the ‘Chapter 2’ screen. Pressing continue button brought me back to the main screen.