Shadows: Price for Our Sins:

In Brief:
Shadows: Price for Our Sins is a Halloween themed Hidden Object game (HOG). It was originally given away HERE on November 17, 2018 where it received a positive 85% from 7 votes with 20 comments; then again on August 23, 2020 where it received a positive 92% from 24 votes with 16 comments which you can read HERE.

You can see some videos of game play .......SPOILER ALERT......... HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE; as well as a couple of written walkthrough's of the game on Gamezebo and Casual Game Guides.

Introduction:
The game takes place on the abandoned Stone farm, where some students have decided to throw a Halloween party. But whilst preparing for their party, they find an ancient artefact that opens a portal to the Underworld! The captured souls of the Stone family, held by Lord of Darkness Samhain, escape. The enraged demon takes the students' souls in revenge, but one girl escapes his clutches - Dylan. Fortunately for her, the escaped spirits want to help her free her friends and get revenge on the evil Samhain. They ask only that she investigates the terrible crimes of the past, and discover the ancient origins of artefact. Start playing and learn the earthly sins that keep the forsaken ghosts on the old farm. Why can't they abandon it without your help? Will Dylan save her friends and her boyfriend? And above all, who lured the students into the trap on that witch-cursed farm?

Features:

-Thrilling mystical atmosphere
-35 quest scenes
-18 HO scenes
-30 mini games

The original introduction posted on 17th November 2018, reposted 20th August 2020 was taken from Steam, but the game has since been removed from the platform. The following reference was accessed via iWin games HERE then again 16th September 2021

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 envelopes 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 actually 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 fairly hackneyed “free the ghosts” theme, it supports the theme with both interesting gameplay and really nice character art.

My favourite thing about the game, actually, are its mid-game storytelling cinematics. These depart from the fully-rendered 3D methods used in the majority 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.

Reference accessed HERE, and originally posted by Nellie Johnson on Feb 20, 2013, Edited and reposted by Whiterabbit-uk 17th Nov 2018, 20th August 202 and 16th September 2021.

Notes on Security
Because the size of the game was over the allowed size to upload to Virus Total, I split the installed game into two parts, removing the largest folder ''images' and scanning it separately. The scan found 1 hit/s (Zillya) from 60 antimalware engines. (Zillya ) is one of only several that often tag these free games from all the others; most of which are better known and more reliable. 59 other antimalware engines found the installed game safe, so it's very likely to be a false positive.

The downloaded executable 'may' include some low level adware that only opens your browser once to MyPlayCity's (MPC's) home page after the game has installed and also places a couple of shortcuts onto your desktop (which can be safely deleted once the game has installed).

The installation does NOT inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to MPC's home page following the games installation, it earns MPC some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free.


You can see the scan results of the scan for both the main game folder and the image folder below:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/83538e44982eb1744a6aaeaf5eed068bb0e1f494d6958de2cc1bc3aff007d983?nocache=1 (main folder)

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/0851aeaab3d53bd5d9c3c950757c1364d5c497f4dc8711b2945724cc33d91042?nocache=1 (images)