From the unknown to the dark shadows, Ereban: Shadow Legacy is here to put you through a mysterious stealth adventure, filled with good narratives.
Now and then, the relevancy of stealth games appears and disappears. They aren’t like their counterpart genres, they do not stick much into the people’s interest, whereas the action-packed ones always get the spotlight. For example, if you were to go out and ask people which stealth game they remember, most of the time the answer is either going to be Dishonored or Splinter Cell, which has turned into a dust-collecting state as of this year.
The reason why most stealth games do not bind well with players is that they are slow-paced, too quiet, and uninteresting to go through. But, throw a little bit of action in there, like the assassination or silent takeouts, and people suddenly start praising the title for being impressive. As I stated earlier, people really like a bit of action, and employing it in a stealth game leads to being favorable by many. Come to think of it, if you strip any action element from a stealth game, it becomes a horror game where you are hiding from a creature. Quite interesting now that I think of it.
Anyways, horror games are completely beside the point, we are here to look at Ereban: Shadow Legacy and how it reminded me that, even if small, a nice stealth game can be pretty neat to dive into. The reason why I am coming with this statement is, that stealth games can be very boring due to their very sluggish gameplay.
As you have a long wait and check your surroundings just to get past some guards- a small hiccup by your or the game’s end kills the whole purpose of waiting for thirty seconds. People do not favor “wasting” their time waiting just to be screwed over, and that is completely understandable.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy, on the other hand, is somewhat of a fast-paced stealth game with lots of narrative built on top. We take control of Ayana, a member of a forgotten and lost tribe called Ereban. During the events of Ereban: Shadow Legacy, a company that uses the energy from the sun of the solar system has been ruling every race on every earth, thanks to the immaculate power they source from the Sun itself.
Therefore, the last Ereban, Ayana, could be the ultimate power for the company to fix what’s stopping ultimate domination over every single being. The whole idea is not mentioned through the first hours of the game, but its narrative later opens up to realities where not everything is as it seems.
At the beginning of the game, Ayana arrives at the Helios HQ, the company that runs the infinite sun energy business, to cooperate. Being smart, Ayana realizes that something is quite off with how she is being trained and showing her powers to a corporation that would absolutely exploit her capabilities to their benefit.
Just before being captured, she uses her special ability to escape and is then rescued by, according to Helios Corporation, a terrorist organization. We all know that these people rescued Ayana for her safety and were willing to cooperate to bring down the terrible system that Helios built.
Since Ereban: Shadow Legacy is a straight-up stealth game, the mechanics can shine right away once you get used to how they feel. Ayana can use her shadow ability, which is an inheritance from her Ereban genes. She can merge into shadows and move without being seen and once she gets into a surface with light, she comes out from the shadow. The basic premise of the title is built on this idea and honestly, it feels quite fluid despite the whole world being under the oozing heat-wave of the sun.
“Lurking in the shadows” mechanic opens up quite a lot of possibilities in terms of traversing the unreachable destinations. Since walls also have shadows, Ayana can simply climb the walls and jump from them to climb onto places that seem too high up. Wall climbing does not stop there, you can also use walls to pseudo-jump over ditches, the sort of stuff you’d see Prince of Persia do with wall-running. Just to let you know, the shadow merge mechanic is limited to a certain time, so you have to use your time well.
It is not a stealth game if you don’t put up some enemies around the corners for your protagonist to get busted. The Pinnacle of the stealth games, guards, also exist in Ereban: Shadow Legacy. After Ayana’s escape, Helios’ robots called SYMs are employed on the field.
Most of these robots have flashlights equipped so once they see you, it gets hard for you to dive deep into the shadows. There are clever ways to both avoid and take down the SYM bots, and it is totally up to your choice to go either rogue or become a ghost in the field.
Talking about playstyles, Ereban: Shadow Legacy provides an overall level screen at the end, where you can see the stats after the end of a chapter. The end screen basically runs down your performance in the chapter by counting your takedowns, secret findings, times being spotted, or bodies of robots being found.
At the end of each chapter, Ereban: Shadow Legacy gives you a letter score, which depends on your playstyle. Being sneaky, not killing any guards, and completing every object is regarded with the “Ghost” rating while destroying every robot in the level gives you the “Ruthless” rating.
The best part of the rating system is you can absolutely go back and try the chapters again without any loss, in short, Ereban: Shadow Legacy gives you the opportunity to practice your stealth for future levels or simply, retry the levels to improve your stealth capabilities. Believe it or not, stealth games are the underdogs of games with replay value because they provide different approaches to levels at any given time.
It is totally fine if you, or someone else, does not like stealth games for their slow pacing, but with patience and planning, they too can become rather enjoyable to play through. Ereban: Shadow Legacy is just another stealth game underneath the great story regardless.
Unlike other stealth games that rely too much on extra tools like weapons or gadgets, Ereban: Shadow Legacy uses tools to a bare minimum. Instead, we upgrade Ayana’s capabilities of using her shadow gadgets by upgrading them at workbenches.
There are a few Shadow Orbs scattered around levels that are crucial to adding new mechanics to our protagonist’s shadow-merging technique, such as dashing in the shadow lurking mode or being able to hide bodies with the shadows. In another way, Ayana doesn’t stay as the character we know from the start of the story, we get to choose her destiny by choosing the mechanics and options we think it suit her the best.
I briefly mentioned Ayana’s personality early on, right? Ayana is not a mute character unlike most of the stealth games where our protagonist tries to keep silent to obey the rules of being a serious guy or a mean femme fatale.
But Ayana is completely opposite where she would do her best to know what happened to her family, friends, and all of her race. There is a big mystery about the loss of Ereban after all, and she is right to be curious about it, therefore she just asks and talks to people. Luckily, the “terrorist organization” mentioned earlier is here to help her by giving more information about her past in exchange for Ayana helping them out.
Ayana is quite talkative, yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is boring to listen to. She is mostly aware of her surroundings, always questioning and when something goes out of order, she does her best to fix it. One-liners are expected from a girl who loves to poke around fun, but even she knows when to stop it, so is at least not on the same level as a 90s mascot, dripping with edge and bland outcries about having balls of steel or something.
Here are a few interesting things I picked up while playing Ereban: Shadow Legacy. Since the title is a semi-adventure game based on movement, picking a controller would be a suitable option in order to experience it fully. But as it turns out, the gamepad completely takes away the freedom of taking a quick look around. With a mouse, it becomes easier to look for threats or openings while it takes longer time to just turn the camera around. No worries, it is just a little recommendation, gamepad also works fine regardless.
Graphics and sound design are crafted well around the themes and environments of Ereban: Shadow Legacy. Since most of our adventures take on barren desserts, empty temples, and swamp forests under the scorching sun, the background music changes according to your surroundings. It can be considered a staple mechanic, but being spotted or robots searching for you also has a dramatic effect on the music, giving you a rush of adrenaline once you are accidentally spotted.
Graphics are somewhat of a throwback to the past when the cel-shaded style of approach was new and cool to experiment with. Lots of visual clues appear in the game, such as walls with purple paint to give direction to the player, or when Arayana’s feathers and clothes give blue light in shadow, showing players that they can use shadow superpower to traverse too. It is certainly stylized for a simple game, and you cannot miss the little details in the game.
The company keeps talking about its innovative halo around the sun at the beginning of the story, and once you go out and take a look above, you can see the halo, which is a nice touch. What I am saying is, that Ereban: Shadow Legacy won’t miss on any details, let it be small or crucial that affect the whole story.
In the end, Ereban: Shadow Legacy is a fun and well-crafted stealth game that would eventually draw non-stealth-game-enjoyers. It’s not even that tactical and breakdowns between stealth sections give a breather to the player, making it a narrative action game rather than a serious stealth game where you have to save a president or something. Sure, some bugs did occur during my gameplay, such as falling through the map geometry or watching Ayana getting clipped while crouching on stairs.
However, the game doesn’t take itself very seriously, is quite forgiving, and sometimes can be relaxing too. I’d say Ereban: Shadow Legacy is a great take on stealth action games that make people sleep because instead of elements that bore people, it takes another path to deliver the stealth genre to the masses.
