Shadowside was a real roller coaster but not in a good way. I started off willing to quit the game by the second chapter because I loathed the save system and had encountered a lot of technical issues. Then I had talked myself into sticking with it once I figured out how the save system works and had started to enjoy it. Then it went off the rails story wise into an incoherent mess by the end. I liked the idea of the story and what I saw of it but it seemed to switch genres from crime thriller to supernatural to horror and back again so many times. It didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be. It also has a bad habit of introducing various plot points and before it even explains it at all they’re already onto the next plot twist that made little sense that also won’t be explained. The game is visually very good. Object detail on most things is well done. Weather detail is well done. Blood is decent. Some things such as people are just average though. One weird thing was the audio for the voices. You can’t turn it off. This makes things weird because while everybody in the game spoke Russian all of the writing and subtitles were in English. It was just jarring to see a police car with English writing; ads and posters in English; car speedometers in MPH (which suggests United States not Russia); police radio banter in English; but then to have everybody speak Russian. The game had some good exploration to it as well although some better hints could have made for less wandering around aimlessly. There were was an effort to vary the game play which I can commend. There were stealth sections; some QTE sections; exploration; and some puzzles. I wouldn’t say the game excelled at any one of them but it was competent in them. Other things I will mention is that there are times you get a lamp to light dark areas but it comes on automatically, you can’t choose when to use it. There are enemies you have to sneak by in the stealth sections that one hit kill you and you can’t fight back which is a concept I despise. I will also say I loved the character of the cat. It may seem a strange thing to praise but there is a cat you encounter and the behaviour of it such as getting mad at water was fantastic. The game has a “true end” and “bad ends” which are basically faux choices you can make that kill you. I hate faux choices. I believe any ending should be a thought out valid ending. The game also revived a concept from the mid 00’s when every game had blood on the screen when you were injured. I hated it as much then as I do now.
I played the game on Linux using Proton. Here is where I will delve into some technical issues I encountered. Sometimes the game would not allow me to move. I could look around but not move forward; back; etc. I had to Alt-Tab out of the game to fix this when it happened. At least Alt-tab worked properly which was nice. Other times the game would only fill half my screen. I had to exit and relaunch the game to fix this. The save system to the game was what finally did me in so early in it. It saves at the start of each chapter. This is annoying because the game doesn’t tell you this, you have to find out the hard way. If you quit before the end of the chapter you will find yourself starting at the beginning of it. Even when it does save it doesn’t tell you it’s doing so. I wish the game had a manual save system or at least had more checkpoints as chapters seem to be 20-30 minutes at times. I also ran into an issue where I jumped up on some pipes in chapter two in a room and couldn’t jump down. I was stuck up there and had to quit. The game has a v-sync toggle; three graphics settings; and an FOV slider that goes from 30-80. Performance was pretty good as it stayed well above 60 FPS maxed out for all but a few seconds it was in the 50’s. You can’t rebind keys which is annoying. There was also one clipping error where when your loading a box onto a truck and the box went through the trunk itself.
Game Engine: Cryengine V
Graphics API: DXVK
Disk Space Used: 7.28 GB
Game Version Played: 1.1
Graphics Settings: V-Sync on; 1920x1080; 80 FOV; motion blur off; chromatic aberration on; Ultra settings
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1830-3487 MB
CPU Usage: 19-61 %
RAM Usage: 4.4-5.3 GB
Frame Rate: 52-143 FPS
Any one of my issues would have been forgivable but the combination was causing me a lot of annoyance. Also as mentioned the narrative gets convoluted by the end. Overall the game has some good parts and isn’t bad but also isn’t good. There are worse games out there and better. I paid $1.14 CAD for Shadowside and finished it in four hours and twenty six minutes.
My System:
Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.3.1 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.1.1-zen1-zen | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz | Proton 7.0-5