“Is there anything interesting going on around here?”
So queries one of the random pedestrians that populate the half-convoluted, half-dull world of Shadow of Destiny. At various points in the game, the proper answer to that question is either “Kinda, yeah, but it’ll take me a while to explain it,” or “Nah. You wanna go for a drink or something?”
Review of Shadow of Destiny
by X-34 minus 5R1-6X36
Alas, the sole bar in the town of the fictional German town of Lebensbaum (“life tree”) is often closed; anyway, if it does happen to be open, you can’t do much once you enter. But perhaps I should back up a bit.
You play Shadow of Destiny as the awkwardly named Eike Kusch. Not “AY-keh,” as the Japanese pronunciation would have it, and as Eike’s distinctly anime-ish appearance would suggest, but “IKE,” as in the fella who presciently warned us about the military-industrial complex. Eike is a lanky gent who is prone to exaggerated cranial double-takes, and who is voiced by, according to the internets, an actor named Scott Keck, whom I wish well but whose voice I hope never to hear again. It is truly one of the poorest voice performances I’ve heard in a long time. And the rest of the cast, faced with the same poorly written and -translated dialogue right out of Monty Python’s “my hovercraft is full of eels” sketch, fares little better. It’s an unpleasant game to listen to, not just because of the terrible voice acting, but because the effects of the compression/decompression process are (for the first time in my PSP experience) noticeable to the point of distracting.
I seem to keep getting sidetracked. Funny: I didn’t think I had that much to say about this game.
This is a time-travel game. Time travel never makes sense: there are always narrative gaps and implausibilities and suchlike. This is OK, really – it’s part of the genre, as far as I’m concerned. I liked Hot Tub Time Machine just fine, and was not troubled too much by its inconsistencies.
Shadow of Destiny is fairly ambitious – perhaps too ambitious – in its attempt to weave time-travel into its story. As the story begins, lanky Eike finds himself imprisoned in a purgatory by Homunculus, an androgynous oddball with seemingly malicious intentions. Homunculus (every mention of whose name conjured for me visions of Wallace Shawn, whose presence would be most welcome here) gives Eike the “Z-pad,” which is not an internet-enabled feminine hygiene product available only in Akihabara but a time-travel device whose ‘Z’ presumably stands for the German word for “time,” Zeit. With the Z-pad, Eike can shuffle back and forth between 2001 (the “time in which [he] originally exist[s],” to use but one of the game’s thoroughly stilted phrasings), 1980 (complete with beWalkman’d joggers!), 1902, and 1580, when Lebensbaum was a mere cobblestoned village whose peasant inhabitants were constantly in search of something interesting to do.
In his time-shufflings, Eike meets various Lebensbaumers, then their ancestors, and their doppelgängers, and so forth. Most of the micro-scale tasks that Eike must undertake involve using some item or bit of knowledge from the past to help himself out of a bind in the present, or vice versa. I’ve read some online criticism of this game, the focus of which was that the tasks are a bit simplistic: there’s really only one way to solve them, and the solutions are telegraphed pretty clearly. This is, for the most part, true, but a bigger problem is that some of motivations behind these micro-tasks are quite opaque. Occasionally, I just got lucky in grabbing the right item. Many of the tasks/quests are a bit arbitrary.
Oh, I forgot to mention that Eike dies a lot. Like, all the time, usually because of some impishness on the part of Homunculus. I must’ve died 20 times in playing this game, even though, as far as I know, I did everything the game suggested I do to prolong my life. It gets annoying, this frequent dying. If you play this game, I’d suggest using the “Save” function often.
The main selling points of Shadow of Destiny (or, as George McFly and/or a less charitable reviewer might call it, Shadow of Density) are its intricate storyline and its multiple endings. The story does become intricate, what with the jumping back from one time to another to another. Often, in fact, the object of the quest at hand gets obscured, which is why the designers gave Eike a notepad/diary, in which he ostensibly writes down everything that happens to him. The notepad, in addition to being one of the game’s main sources of fractured English, becomes a clumsy if occasionally necessary device for sifting through the various temporal striations of the narrative.
As for the multiple endings, well, they’re there, all right, but I didn’t find the game compelling enough to run through it again to “unlock” whatever scenes and endings that I may have missed. The game has a “Choose Your Own Adventure” structure to it, in that choices you make at one point in the story determine further events and outcomes. (This is another reason to hit “Save” often: you can go back to the divergence-point in a forking path if your initial selection leaves Eike dead – again.) Certain “bonus” endings can only be accessed if you play through the five “first-level” endings – a task I can’t imagine being especially satisfying (or relevant) to anyone but the obsessive-compulsive.
If the story gets a little out-of-hand, it’s because, at root, this is a game that aspires to be a movie (one that’s in dire need of a script doctor); it just happens to have some interactive elements built into it. Its narrative ambitions are rather too grandiose, but its gameplay is only average. It’s not a particularly successful blend of the ostensibly cinematic and the videogame.
That said, this game is fine, really. It was engaging enough for me to actually finish it – something I rarely do before writing these reviews. I sometimes found the stiff dialogue annoying, but sometimes I found it oddly endearing. They were trying so hard, you know? Ultimately, Shadow of Destiny is a solid but not thrilling way to spend some time, not a game that really cries out to be played.
