The Shrouded Isle
Decide the fate of your village and please the cruel gods!
The Shrouded Isle is definitely a game that can bring some attention. You are a High Priest in a coastal village. Your purpose? Lead the people, your cult, to please the sleeping God beneath the waves, so he can rise up and birth a new era for the worthy.
Yes, this could be named a “cult simulator”. In a Lovecraftian like setting, you need to manage the families in the village, to perform tasks in the name of the unnamed God. And those tasks are cruel and totally not conventional. Your “success” is measured by couple of indicators (which are really in proper, cruel spirit of the game) and the loyalty of the families, the houses, in your village.
What gives a lot of favour to the game - is definitely the art style. First thing that everyone will notice are the colours. The game is basically black and white, but the colour schemes are “tinting” it - with probably the most noticeable one, which is a yellow-green tint. It gives a great atmosphere, although might be too bright and vivid for some. But it shouldn’t cover the great art style of the game itself - all the menus, the characters (with distinct traits, yet with their faces or eyes covered) are even deepening the feelings of cruelty and madness.
Your task is to drive your people for couple of years, and fulfill the needs of the God by adhering his bloody and cruel traditions. Each season, you choose 1 member from each of the families - and during this season, you will appoint them, choosing from some of them couple of times, to work on specific tasks. Each task will affect one of the indicators of your village, and depending on who is performing them (based on their abilities and statistics) - the results may be better or worse (or even very bad). Choosing (or not) a member from one of the families will also improve, or deteriorate, their loyalty against you. But here is the main twist - at the end of each season, after all the tasks are completed, you need to choose one of the members, from the ones that were appointed. And sacrifice them. Surprised? I mean, the God needs his sacrifices, doesn’t he? It introduces a big twist in the game - you want to choose the best members of your society to perform the tasks in the best way - but you also want to get rid of the corrupted ones (or in this case, those that are too good), whilst still balancing the state of your village and your reputation amongst the families.
There is quite a lot mechanics in the game, including discovery of people’s traits, making it a bit of a detective work, but most of the game is built on balance and keeping things equal. Most basic mechanics are introduced by some small tutorial, but quite a lot of them need to be discovered by the player. And many of them are not so obvious - you will actually start to experiment, to confirm that this is true. And to finish the game successfully, you really need to discover and leverage them. But it’s great fun - a mixture of detective work, management and all sprinkled in a great and very dark atmosphere. Of course, these type of games have a lot of randomness in them and this is also the case here. One might say that it’s sometimes too random, but to be honest - after discovering some of the more obscure rules, it’s fairly easy to finish the game.
I think it is a great idea, in a great art style. Maybe the execution isn’t perfect, maybe it could be a bigger and more complicated game - but I think it really serves its purpose. A rather small game, for couple of runs to try it out and finish. For people that are into management games and love the Lovecraftian feel, it’s definitely worth a while.
My rating: 7/10
Playtime: 7h
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The Shrouded Isle on Steam