The gameplay isn't remotely balanced. That's a bit key if you're making a Souls-like, isn't it?

Shrouded in Sanity is a decent game, particularly coming from a single developer, but it has a wealth of problems that keep me from recommending it. In addition to the gameplay just not feeling complete, the level design ranges from quaint to hideous to blindingly repetitive, and the writing chops on display are -- no pun intended -- soulless.

One-on-one combat is alright; decently fast-paced. If multiple enemies enter the fray, combat tends to turn into button mashing and a race to either escape or separate enemies. Speaking of escaping, you can bypass all non-boss combat by running away. Could be cool, but it's clearly not intended. Fighting enemies will consist of quick sword swipes, heavy sword swipes (pointless -- they don't do much more damage and put you at risk of attack), and either dodging or blocking attacks, coupled with the chance to parry enemies using a gun or timed-attacks a la Buttborne / Dark Souls.

More likely you'll choose to either roll or block exclusively rather than combining tools during your enemies' frenetic onslaughts, making whichever you don't use a pointless addition to the gameplay. The gun is also useless except for one or two specific bosses, who, due to poor design choices, open their arms wide to welcome a stunning bullet over and over and over and over without break. (Think Gothic 3's awful stunlocking boars, or, more accurately, getting to be that stunlocking boar.) Enemies who themselves sport guns aren't programmed correctly, and instead of offering any attempt at challenge, run up to your avatar and fire in the wrong direction until you kill them. (This includes a boss!)

The game's full of poor or incomplete design choices like that. Admirable for a single dev with an eye for Souls' formula, sure, but still glaring -- annoying -- faults.

The art style itself ranges from beautiful to hideously drab. Mostly this impacts the level design. Room by room, most of the game's Victorian setting look too similar, making some halls and rooms almost indistinguishable from one another. Moving between rooms isn't consistent, either -- you'll enter a south-facing doorway (i.e., 'down'), and the next screen that loads will reposition the world so you're entering from the E, W, or even S. Your view repositions itself a lot, which is...just a bizarre decision. Some rooms and some objects are an ugly mash of pixels that require poorly-written text to explain that Yes, you're looking a a dead body and Yes, it had lots and lots of stab wounds and a gunshot wound.

On the topic of the writing: My god.

The storytelling potential in games is often key to me, even over gameplay, and the developer shows no interest in constructing an interesting world with this game. You play a hunter with a contract: Raised from the dead with enforced nebulousness, you're to banish the fog oppressing the gameworld by defeating four knights and disposing -- blah blah blah -- of a corrupted king. The narrative and the in-game text are mostly meaningless word-vomit stolen from Buttborne or Lovecraft, with no care or even real interest underlying them. You can almost feel the train of thought behind some of the misspelled text: "Didn't Lovecraft write about something called Nyarlathaloops and it had some Egyptian Illuminati thingy on it? That'd be cool here. Breasts are cool, too, so this room should get a lot of text explaining that these books contain my porn collection. Hmm, 'The book is just lots of obscene sexual acts....' Yeah, that sounds cool, and the ellipsis sells it. This room will explain to the player that it has 'impossible geometry' because that sounds cool, too, and Lovecraft is cool."

Most of the in-game text serves no purpose, nor does it add to the game's lore: It's all about telling, not showing. Interacting with objects simply describes that you're looking at blood; that this one body among hundreds has a bullet wound in it; that this chalkboard equation looks 'inefficient' -- whatever the heck that's supposed to mean to the player or player character; that this room simply is "...impossible geometry," despite the "geometry" in question being your run-of-the-mill Tetris blocks. It's just...braindead and boring. And rife with spelling errors and run-on sentences and broken English and characters MUAH-HAH-HAAAAHHHHHHH-ing at the player while twirling their insane mustaches. Yeugh.

Shrouded in Sanity scratches the Souls itch once you've exhausted From Software's modern catalogue, sure, but only for 3-4 hours, and not nearly to the degree of some other 2016 titles. I'd still recommend this for the curious and those just desperate for the genre, but players are better off trying Momodora IV (an easy GOTY contender), DarkMaus, and Salt & Sanctuary first. ( )