Once, an alert was triggered leading to my death, but upon respawning the alert was still active. The AI has a tendency of getting stuck and glitching out of patrol paths endlessly. Throughout my play, I was hit through walls, unable to activate certain abilities when I needed them and was led to misleadingly switched objective points quite often. Generally speaking, the harder a game becomes, the more reliant the player becomes on responsive controls, and on the game being tightly designed.įor all the things Aragami is, a tightly-designed game it is not. As the game progresses, the cracks in Aragami’s design become more and more pronounced. Unfortunately, I felt the need to specify that it’s enjoyable when it’s working properly because Aragami is a game that’s riddled with numerous technical issues. Aragami is at its best when all of your abilities come together, allowing you to sneak through what seemed liked an impossibly fortified area. It was always satisfying to carefully shadow jump through one guard patrol after another. Its bottom line is having fun, and for that, it earns my gratitude, especially because when it is working properly, it’s a sincerely enjoyable game.
Aragami isn’t about discouraging fun for the sake of a better narrative. This was a satisfying task to complete, and by not having these medals and their respective play styles affect the narrative, the designers of Aragami narrowly avoid the Dishonored pitfall, where the player was given cool new weapons and techniques for killing guards, and then punished with a bad ending for using any of it. Instantly being able to re-select any chapter in the menu encourages players to go back, play each chapter with different techniques, earn every medal and aim towards getting an S rank for all chapters. With 13 chapters, altogether clocking in at about 10 hours, facilitating replayability is a worthy goal, and the designers of Aragami have pulled this off tremendously. These medals encourage players to try chapters in different ways, and the approach to doing a lethal run or a pacifist run will give the player a vastly different experience. After becoming comfortable with these abilities I stopped thinking about which would be the most effective, but which would be the most fun to use, which is a big point in Aragami’s favor.Ī total of 3 medals can be earned for each chapter one for completing a mission undetected, one for not killing any guards, and one for killing every guard. These new abilities seem like well-considered extensions of the existing shadow based gameplay, and the guards seemed as if there were all carefully placed with the use of each of these abilities in mind. Your abilities are countered with guards who will kill with a single hit, snipers with improved vision, and light explosives that can either kill Aragami or give away his position.ĭemon and Ghost powers can be unlocked by finding hidden scrolls scattered throughout every mission. A guard approaching your position is stressful in most other stealth titles, but in Aragami, you’re given the ability to handle this with ease. Being able to instantly jump between shadows changed the stealth format in some pretty key ways. The shadow-based stealth mechanics felt like more than a simple gimmick.
It accomplishes this with some clumsy dialogue and a pretty standard fare story, but by the end, it feels as if Aragami’s tale had managed to drum up some honest intrigue.
Most of your time in Aragami is spent sneaking through battle camps and castles, avoiding guards and retrieving talismans to dispel the force that traps Yamiko while learning more about her past and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Aragami’s summon. She tells Aragami that she’s being held captive and needs his help, and so begin the events of the single night in which the game takes place. The player takes control of Aragami, a vengeful shadow spirit summoned by a mysterious girl Yamiko. With new ghost and demon powers to unlock and 13 chapters to sneak through, Aragami manages to be a worthy stealth title, but not without a few glaring issues. With the ability to leap between shadows and even create them, Aragami felt distinct enough to earn its place in the stealth genre. No veteran of the stealth genre is new to staying in the shadows, but Aragami is a game that takes this idea just a little further. Where to Buy: Steam, PlayStation Marketplace