I believe stealth games are not what they used to be. Well, it’s kind of hard for me to say that because I’ve not played, in-depth, most of the stealth games of the yonder years. But I have seen extensive footage and playthroughs, and it’s quite easily perceptible that these games were difficult. You see, those stealth games took a page from the school of hard knocks, they pushed the player to their cognitive limit. Patience, methodical planning, and timing were some of the tenets of older stealth games. Now, I’m not saying current stealth-based games don’t have that, but the focus has shifted and stealth has gotten easier, and it never really feels like the challenge is quite there. But this is where Aragami comes in.
Aragami plays on few of the strengths of modern stealth design while still having a strong footing in the old-school ways.
The game has been a passion project brought t0 fruition by Lince Works. It started off as ‘Path of Shadows‘ but after working on it for a couple of years, they redesigned and renamed it Aragami. But it still maintains a semblance of its previous self; mostly in the form of its graphics and art style. Before we get into that, let me give you the mandatory rundown of the story. You take the role of an Aragami, a summoned shadow spirit that does the bidding of the summoner. The person who summoned you is this girl called Yamiko, and she requires your aid in taking out the clan that has killed her family and her village, and more importantly she needs you to free her from her captors. The Yamiko you interact with is actually a projection and with the aid of that projection, she is able to guide you through the various areas, and find the required talismans that are needed to free her.
Simply put – a person needs help, you go sneaky sneaky and stabby stabby until that person is free.
It’s interesting to note that you unravel more of the story and subplots by overhearing conversations between enemies, and at times Aragami will comment on the content of such conversations. So it actually pays to roam each area and uncover more angles to the story. However, the story isn’t the selling point of Aragami, it’s the mechanics and design where this game shines the brightest (pardon the irony). So, the key focus of all the mechanics is the shadows. You being a shadow assassin, it kind of makes sense that this is where you get your mojo. Thus, you traverse the maps using the shadows to your advantage and as a well to replenish your powers.
Most of your powers depend on the absence of light and the presence of darkness, thus, if you wanted to teleport to a spot, there has to be a shadow over there. Light is your greatest weakness, as you’ll find that when you run past lamps and fires, your power gauge depletes drastically and you’re just a shadowy meat sack of sorts. This one key feature changes how players approach the game completely; you have to be patient and methodic. You have to time the enemies rounds, memorize the routes they take, and you got to keep in mind their line of sight.
So expect to mess up a lot. Like really a lot.
The game does not punish if you decide to go down a more bloody path; by that I mean if you want to go around cutting down bodies because what good is a sword if you can’t use it. Though, don’t consider this to be on the lines of Dishonored where upfront confrontations were possible more or less. Rather Aragami’s focus is about lethal and non-lethal stealth. So, if you want you can sneak past the enemies or you can take them down one by one. The beauty is in the way the game lets you flawlessly shift betweens those two approaches without it at ever feeling like you were forced into one of them.
There aren’t levels that force you to adopt a complete non-lethal approach or levels where you need to let a few heads roll; Aragami is quite balanced that way.
The thing is that the game sort of ends up making the non-lethal approach the easier way out because a good portion of the upgrades favor it. An example of such a scenario is that when you go about killing enemies, you have to ensure their bodies are nowhere in the sight of other enemies otherwise they’ll ring the alarm and that only makes things way, way trickier. However, two hours into the game, you can buy an upgrade that lets you dissipate bodies. Thus, you can flawlessly wipe all human life from a level and not have any corpses to show for it. The non-lethal approaches have a decent number of upgrades but they aren’t lopsided as the lethal upgrades.
Surprisingly, the game does really well in its rare moments of platforming. This is where methodic planning gets defenestrated and you have to rely on your quickness to combine your shadow abilities to scale a certain area. There’s a certain beauty in which the game is able to switch between such moments and it doesn’t feel cheap rather it feels stimulating. Though it should be kept in mind that the most of the upgrades don’t do much to change the platforming scenarios, so in that way it feels like these parts of the game might have been an afterthought.
The level design in the game is smart; each area feels intricately woven and intertwined. Added to this, the layout of each level feels unique and requires you to constantly change up the manner in which you traverse the level. Sometimes you find yourself in open areas that are ripe for exploration and all forms of creative maneuvering, and in other segments you find yourself roaming tight corridors with short lines of sight.
Aragami never lets you get comfortable or complacent with one thing, it’s demanding and requires you to always be on your toes.
This may sound like nitpicking but the only downside to Aragami’s level design was that it felt as though the majority of my game time was spent rambling through different sized cemeteries. At times I would meander and skulk about a tightly packed graveyard with numerous tombstones, while at other times it would be an openly-spaced graveyard with fewer tombstones. The level aesthetics in that manner felt very stale.
Speaking of aesthetics, the game’s choice of cel-shaded does wonders to accentuate the overall tone and theme of the Aragami. It impeccably blends with the gameplay, especially during the stealth segments. It creates this world that is serious in its tone but not to the point that it doesn’t feel peaceful when it needs to. Coupled with this aesthetic is a beautifully composed soundtrack. At times you’ll find yourself pausing just to admire the soothing instruments playing in the background. The only jarring part of the soundtrack is that at times it isn’t mixed well into the gameplay. There were numerous moments where I was in the midst of taking down a slew of enemies but my immersion was ruined because the score’s tone was still stuck in a low lull.
For when Aragami wants to, it really excels at emulating the stealth mechanics and style of the older games in the genre. Though it’s replay value isn’t strong, it’s definitely worth the first run through. Aragami, for all its faults, is still a solid stealth game that takes older gamers down memory lane and teaches new gamers a thing or two about old-school stealth.
This game was reviewed using a PC and PS4 code given by the developer.
Aragami is available on steam and the PlayStation store.
