Tactical card games and RPG’s have a lot in common. Both involve careful planning, careful execution, and a lot of reflection on what went right and, all too often, what went wrong. Stats and numbers feature prominently in both as do themes and builds. Yet, we see so few examples of them overlapping. Shadowhand is an upcoming game from Grey Alien Games that is looking to add depth to the strategy card game by making it a full fledged RPG complete with stats, inventory, abilities, and equipment you can use to improve and enhance your success in tense duels against AI enemies. Building off of the success of their last game Regency Solitaire, indie team Grey Alien Games is looking to take their solitaire-style turn based combat formula a step further with deckbuilding and character building.
Shadowhand Game
Genre: Strategy Card RPG
Developed by: Grey Alien Games
Published by: Positech Games
Release date: May 2017
Platforms: PC
Website: http://www.positech.co.uk/shadowhand/index.html
Developed by: Grey Alien Games
Published by: Positech Games
Release date: May 2017
Platforms: PC
Website: http://www.positech.co.uk/shadowhand/index.html
Ghost-like soul. Shadowhand ghost-like soul Myths // Letters in Tangier, released 13 March 2020 1. Letters in Tangier Art work is a screen print on cotton by the wonderful Tim Devries. Since we won't be doing a show tonight I figured I'd share these two songs that I wrote and recorded in the past couple weeks.
Shadowhand Features
- Duel powerful enemies with unique solitaire-style turn-based combat.
- We follow the story of Lady Cornelia Darkmoor, a beguiling young aristocrat who masquerades as the notorious highwaywoman, Shadowhand.
- Combining an historical visual novel narrative with a card-driven RPG, Shadowhand’s story spans 20 chapters of atmospheric locations including stormy coastlines, mysterious woods and gloomy manors.
Story and Setting
In Shadowhand we follow the story of Lady Cornelia Darkmoor, a well to do aristocrat by day and the outlaw highway-woman Shadowhand by night. The victim of a heist, she is forced to flee a crime scene and operate in the shadows in order to find her close female companion who vanishes during the heist. This isn’t a tale of a hero looking for romance or glory but instead is a tale of corruption, smuggling and blackmail and she is prepared to do whatever is needed, including dueling to the death to get to the truth.
Whether you're a Regency Solitaire pro or only just now hearing about it, don't let Shadowhand slip. This is an addictive little card game with a ton of content, all kinds of stuff to buy, a compelling story and a bunch of intense one-on-one fights with a wide assortment of colorful characters. RIDE WITH SHADOWHAND Shadowhand is a strategic RPG card game. Duel powerful enemies with unique solitaire-style turn-based combat. 2017, Grey Alien Games. Blending solitaire with role-playing, combat and a racy, buccaneering plot, Shadowhand is a delight - and a true British eccentric.
A common theme of the game is the concept of disguises, playing off the popularity of masquerade balls during that time period. Using these conventions for her own convenience, she will be making use of a variety of costume upgrades that both hide her identity and upgrade her abilities in battle as she takes on the dark underworld of smugglers, thieves and other undesirables.
Although the game unfolds over a playmat style of cards you typically see in card games like Magic or Solitaire, the cutscenes and duel background settings all reinforce the historical narrative. There are a variety of locations to play across, includy moody coastlines and woods and the proverbial dark manors and the story unfolds across 20 chapters and 180 levels of action. The design of the cards reflects a similar sense of elegance and these period piece sensibilities.
Gameplay
The game combines the historic visual novel format with a card based RPG and puts you into some tense 1v1 duels via a novel turn-based combat flow. Successfully clearing encounters will gain you experience that you can spend to improve your character. Along the way you’ll also be gathering new weapons, outfits and loot that you can equip to improve your effectiveness during the heat of combat.
The fundamental backbone of the game is the solitaire-style mechanic. Although Solitaire sounds like the penultimate forever alone game, Shadowhand is anything but dull. The cards are numbered and choosing one higher or lower by 1 than the one from the draw pile is how you get going. Once you do, the game becomes about strategy and a number of dueling tactics emerge from the turn based mechanic.
Rather than roll a die or under the hood RNG to determine the outcomes as is common in RPGs, your goal is to get a good card draw, as you would in Magic. Every card you play increases the charge on your weapons which you can use when fully charged. If you get a long run of cards going, you can increase your attack bonus and have it result in a critical hit. As you progress through the game, you will be looting and buying a large variety of weapons and clothing items, which you can then equip strategically via the game’s full inventory system.
Deck building works within the inventory system and lets you choose from a variety of ability cards that compliment your preferred playstyle. They can allow you to do things like see into the future to see what cards are coming up, or other more chaotic functions. You’ll collect power up cards that slot into active and passive abilities as you play that will aid you as you play. They will do things like turning more cards up for you at the beginning of a turn or wiping out one of your enemy’s cards in the heat of combat.
In Shadowhand, weapons and outfits affect what happens in combat. So to get the game to operate as an RPG, there are 6 stats to your character which affect card play, which gives the game it’s RPG backbone while also making it stand apart from conventional RPG structure. Improving the stats of your character confers benefits like finding better loot with Luck, or using your improved Finesse to encourage a better card to come to the top of your deck. You can allocate up to ten points to each of the stats and some outfits let you go above that allocation. The game will give you 40 points to allocate, which allows for customization and specialization, as well as a reason to try different builds since you won’t be able to max each stat.
The weapons are all period specific and have different properties that can help you depending on the foe you’re taking on. They can perform a variety of things like pierce, stun, bleed, poison and more. Mixing and matching the different weapons and their special abilities are key to maximizing your charge when you’re going on a long card-play run.
Your outfits that you equip work on the converse and behave as armor would in a traditional RPG. They protect you from incoming damage but also work differently in the combat stances. Changing what you wear has a significant bearing on gameplay. Overall there are over 13 million unique permutations of clothing that you can slot in. Before a duel starts you are able to mouse over your load out and that of your foe and can change up what you’re wearing depending on what the enemy is bringing to battle. Jewelry and accessories round this out by conferring more gameplay and tactical benefits. There’s a lot you’ll be able to mix and match here, all in the name of fine tuning your card play.
The more I researched this game, the more I really became intrigued. There are a lot of interacting mechanics and adding and RPG stat spread and inventory/equipment option that not only affect the card play but have their own central focus is a great way to take an approachable concept like Solitaire and up the stakes and strategy to it. This feels like the kind of game you boot up to play for 15 minutes and find that 3 hours have gone by. It would be interesting to see it be expanded to a PvP setting at some point in the future, maybe as a DLC. Regardless this is one for the radar next month.
Blending solitaire with role-playing, combat and a racy, buccaneering plot, Shadowhand is a delight - and a true British eccentric.
Shadowhand
Grey Alien Games is the definition of an outsider game developer. A husband-and-wife team based in rural Dorset, Jake Birkett and Helen Carmichael work alone with support from tiny publishers and overseas contractors. Jake isn't a refugee from AAA development, but a veteran of the unfashionable PC casual gaming scene of the last decade, when he churned out cheerful puzzle games for sites like Big Fish. They are also history nuts. Helen, who writes the scenarios, is a historian, while Jake collects coins. When making a game set in historical times, Jake likes to keep a coin from the period on his desk to turn over in his hand while he works. If you had to place them as characters in a contemporary sitcom, it would be The Detectorists, not Silicon Valley.
Shadowhand
- Developer: Grey Alien Games
- Publisher: Positech Games
- Platform: PC, Mac
- Availability: Out now
We should treasure developers like this, who work out of the loop and follow their own passions, because their games are like nothing else. Grey Alien had a minor hit a couple of years ago with Regency Solitaire, a relaxing, immaculate puzzle game that danced elegantly around a light-hearted pastiche of the novels of Jane Austen. I loved it. When they ported it from Big Fish to Steam, it found an unexpected audience there, and Grey Alien were persuaded to make something along the same lines but aimed more squarely at Steam's core gaming crowd.
The result is Shadowhand, which aims to blend the noble pastime of solitaire with the structure and systems of a role-playing game - rather like Puzzle Quest did for match-three puzzle games. It's definitely a more sophisticated game than Regency Solitaire, adding loot, equipment, character attributes and consumable items to the earlier game's arcade-style combos and recharging skills. It also introduces the wonderfully paradoxical concept of turn-based combat solitaire, which is where its RPG systems find purchase and it offers some tactical depth.
Shadowhand is, however - praise be - very much still a Grey Alien game. Instead of building it around a generic fantasy quest, Birkett and Carmichael have swapped Pride & Prejudice for Jamaica Inn, sticking with their native south-west England and winding the clock back a few decades to a more lawless and swashbuckling time of highwaymen, smugglers, corrupt magistrates, hangmen, mysterious ladies and rowdy inns where the grog flows free.
It's even a prequel, of sorts, to Regency Solitaire. Trim enabler 4 0 – improve solid state drive performance. Our hero is a young aristocrat called Lady Cornelia Darkmoor, and when she comes across a dashing gentleman by the name of Lord Fleetwood, you realise you are witnessing the meetcute of Regency Solitaire's kindly aunt and uncle. It turns out this elderly pair had quite an adventurous past. When a coach bearing Cornelia and her companion Mariah to a secret assignation is held up by a highwayman and Mariah disappears, Cornelia implausibly but delightfully begins a career as a masked highwaywoman herself, skirmishing with the vagabonds and ne'er-do-wells that infest the countryside as she seeks to find Mariah and expose a corrupt plot at the heart of decadent high society. As with Regency Solitaire, this storyline isn't much more than frothy pastiche - but it's told briskly, has an arch sense of humour and a good sense of its own silliness, and is steeped in a rich understanding of this ribald period. It's very entertaining.
There's a campaign of 22 chapters to play through, each set in a new location and running through several hands of solitaire. As in Regency Solitaire, these are layouts that you clear by running up or down the order from the card at the top of the waste pile, regardless of suit. (Solitaire aficionados will recognise it as an evolution of the TriPeaks variant.) The layouts themselves are preset, but the deal is randomised. You can only clear fully exposed cards, and the complex fans and curlicues of overlapping cards add a level of strategy and forward thinking to clearing each layout. Aces, Jacks, Queens and Kings have been abandoned - alarmingly, Grey Alien found a significant proportion of players didn't understand them - and replaced with suits that run from zero to nine, which also helps tighten the game balance and make long, wraparound combos a little easier to achieve. New suits have also been invented to replace traditional playing card suits, including 'sword' and 'gun' suits that charge weapons faster for use in combat.
There are plenty of relaxing solo hands to play through, which play very similarly to Regency Solitaire and only lightly interact with the game's RPG side - but each chapter also includes a few duels, in which the solitaire hand is the field of play for turn-based combat. Clearing cards charges your weapons for use, while combos add an attack bonus, instead of adding a gold multiplier as they do in solo hands; you're permitted one attack or item use per turn, and if you can't clear any cards, your turn ends. Weapons are collected as loot, along with consumables and outfit items. Combat takes a while to reveal its true depth, but it is there. There's a detailed layer of combat-specific systems to get into - armour values, chance to pierce, bleed and poison, chance to deflect damage from certain weapon types and so on - and once you get a certain way into the game you'll need to adjust your equipment loadout before each duel to suit your opponent's strengths and weaknesses.
Attributes, meanwhile, are valuable in both solo hands and duels: for example, Insight starts the hand with more cards face up, Finesse draws more useful stock cards, and Luck occasionally clears cards at random. (These points are awarded on level-up, but it seems an XP system was a bridge too far for Grey Alien; you level up automatically at the end of each chapter.) There are passive and active abilities to collect and equip too.
In other words, Shadowhand offers no shortage of tactical nuance and good old RPG optimisation to sink your teeth into. It's not a tough game on normal (the opponent AI is half-blind and misses an awful lot of chances to clear cards), but you'll need to think and plan if you want to get a three-star rating on every encounter. It is also - crucially - still a game of luck. You can draw terrible stock cards and find yourself steamrollered in duels quite easily. The layouts sometimes offer gloriously long combo runs, sometimes measly scraps. Using the very many tools the game places at your disposal to mitigate your luck is a core part of the fun, but many of these tools - for example, the active skill that allows you to reshuffle the whole layout - are themselves dependent on luck, and can still leave you wanting.
Some modern RPG players, weaned on predictable outcomes, might baulk at this, but I love how Shadowhand uses a solitaire hand to fill in for the cruelty and caprice of the dice roll in old-school role-playing. Sometimes things just don't go your way. Besides, the hands are quick to run through and can always be replayed. Shadowhand is never frustrating and always a joy to play; like Regency Solitaire, it has been polished to a sumptuous, walnut glow. The hand-painted artwork is a bit gauche, perhaps, but has a certain Hogarthian charm, and the audio is simply fabulous. Atmospheric ambient sound does as much as the backdrops to bring the scene to life, there's a rollicking score, and crisp arcade-style sound effects - pushed right to the front of the mix, where they belong - make the action of clicking on playing cards almost viscerally thrilling.
Perhaps the best thing about Shadowhand is that it doesn't come from the same place as other video games. Literally so, because who else is making games amid the rolling dales of Dorset? Who else is looking to bodice-ripping historical novels for inspiration? And who else is salvaging the design and aesthetic values of an unloved branch of the video game family tree - the already archaic, almost forgotten world of pre-smartphone casual gaming - and grafting them onto other genres to create something strange and new? This is a great game and a true original. Savour the work of the outsider, because it's rarer than you think.