Shadows: Price for Our Sins

In Brief

A hidden Object game

Introduction:

Are you ready to party? A chilling night of reckoning is unleashed upon guests bold enough to party on Halloween at an abandoned farm house.

As children, you and your friend, Samantha, would play at an old farm during your summer vacations. Years have passed, and Samantha has invited you to join her and a group of fellow students back at the farm for a Halloween party. Little does anyone know - but a demonic force will be crashing the event.

When the partygoers game spirals out of control, a portal to a world of darkness opens to imprison their youthful souls. They soon join company with the rest of the cursed souls collected by the lord of darkness. You alone are their sole hope of rescue.

A freakish fest filled with menacing mysticism awaits your arrival ... That’s of course, if you’re not too afraid to RSVP.

Edited reference accessed HERE. 17th Nov 2018, reposted 20th August 2020

The Game:

As Collector’s Editions dominate the hidden object genre, players have come to expect every game to have a host of extras. But whatever happened to making a good basic game? Although sloppy here and there, Shadows: Price for our Sins, the spooky new adventure by 8 Floor Games, reminds us of the days when developers didn’t pad their products (and their price tags) with pointless extras and focused instead on making great games.

Shadows: Price for our Sins starts with us riding shotgun one rainy night, with a young woman headed towards a Halloween party. After assuring her mother by cell phone that she’s fine, (thumbs down 8 Floor, for showing the heroine using a cell phone while driving) the young lady arrives at a rain-soaked house in the country. Minutes later, what should be a fun-filled evening among friends turns into a nightmare, and not because of a bad batch of seven-layer dip. A sinister mist envelope everyone but the heroine, who soon discovers the guests have been sucked into an occult board game and it’s up to her to get them out.

This provides an interesting enough start to the game, despite the rainy night/spooky house setup. The presentation differs from that of many hidden object titles, employing graphics that appear to be nearly all 3D. Further, menus and on-screen icons are plainer than those in most of today’s opulent games, but they’re efficient and everything does what it should. Some players might feel that Shadows: Price for our Sins takes a bit of an old-fashioned approach to hidden object gameplay. While it does offer straightforward exploration and somewhat simple list-based hidden object scenes, these are still engaging enough to prove the ongoing appeal of the genre.

What makes Shadows: Price for our Sins worth playing—what it does best—is its unusual item use, as well as its often-surprising interactivity. So many hidden object adventures have you do the same things again and again: put hands on clocks, placate mean dogs, open boxes, fix ladders, etc. Here, admittedly, we do some of that, but we also get to do some things a bit outside of the norm.

The most well-made part of the game, though, is the construction of its story. Well, I should clarify; it has two parallel stories and while the one you start with is kind of weak, the one you move into and spend the most time with is really pretty good. Although that portion makes use of a hackneyed “free the ghosts” theme, it supports the theme with both interesting gameplay and really nice character art.

My favourite thing about the game are its mid-game storytelling cinematics. These depart from the fully-rendered 3D methods used in most of the game and use instead some very cool monochromatic, 2D animations. These periodically fill us in on the history of the game’s characters and are narrated by a competent actress with a nice voice. Funny—now that we’re on the subject of sound, I don’t remember the game’s music at all. That either means the story really had me by the lapels or the music was totally forgettable. One thing I haven’t forgotten: how annoying the main object interaction sound effect was. It might be absurd to complain about such a small thing, but hearing a sound like someone slapping a leather sofa with a ping-pong paddle every time I pick up an item, well…ugh

Although Shadows: Price for our Sins did many things well, there were some areas where its edges do start to fray. The first is dialog. Most of it is actually pretty good, but here and there you notice some things that read like they came from a bad online translator. (“Let’s celebrate the holiday of the darkness tonight!” says one character at the start of the game.) The second is incorrect text such as items referred to incorrectly, (“check” for “chalk”) and wrong puzzle info (as in, the directions were meant for a different puzzle). Other things that aren’t that big a deal, but that do detract from having a seamless gameplay experience are the zoom-in windows that don’t always close when you’re done with them, and the occasionally-misleading interactivity. What I mean by the latter is when items remain active after they’ve worn out their usefulness.

These flaws are there, but they’re negligible in the scheme of things. Shadows: Price for our Sins offers an absorbing, unusual adventure that feels plenty long despite its lack of “extras”. It successfully bucks the Collector’s Edition trend by playing like something well-constructed and complete within itself and as such, is worth more than a good number of over-padded CE’s.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Neilie Johnson on Feb 20, 2013, Edited and reposted by Whiterabbit-uk 17th Nov 2018 then again 20th August 2020.

Walthrough and Videos of Shadows: Price of our Sins:

If you get stuck, you can check out a walkthrough of today’s game HERE

You can see several in-game videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE & HERE.