Shadow Man is odd. It’s a 3D platformer that has a Voodoo motif so it at least gets originality points. Actually it’s based on the comic book series of the same name but it’s still different from anything you’ve played. The plot is that the antagonist, Legion is creating an enormous facility in hell called Asylum. In it he plans to house the most vile souls all in one place to feed off of their energy and use it to bring about the apocalypse. At the center of the whole thing is Legion and five serial killers including Jack the Ripper and someone called the Lizard King… not Jim Morrison.
The vast majority of the game takes place in Deadside which is basically hell. The landscape is barren and flowing with blood and lava. Everything is a shade of brown or grey. Some of the doors look like assholes. If you’re lucky, you’ll see something with an extremely muted monochromatic pallet. All and all, it looks pretty fucking boring, (especially the overworld,) but isn’t that pretty much representative of most Playstation games from that era, (even though this game was on all major platforms of the day.) Playstation had better sound and visual capabilities than the N64 but N64 games in general were more interesting to look at because Nintendo dared to use fucking colors. The lack of color is one thing but then there’s also the areas within Asylum that have all this machinery and just an incessant racket and droning of infernal mechanisms and hissing steam and pistons. This shit is making my brain go numb.
So you go around collecting dark souls which, at specific amounts, increase your voodoo power and allow you to open doors to new items and areas. There are 120 dark souls all together. So how many do you need to get to beat the game? I swear if you say 120, I will fucking cut you. There is nothing worse than a mandatory collectathon. Just ask Jet Force Gemini. Luckily no, you do not need to embark on a completionist’s journey to beat the game. You only need about 90 but there are still places in the game you can’t go until you get all 120 of them which leaves me to speculate if maybe you get to go up on top of Asylum and meet zombie Yoshi if you do it.
The gatekeeper at the entrance of hell is Jaunty, a snake with a human skull for a head that wears a hat and speaks with an Irish accent. The hell? Where did they come up with this idea? Is it a voodoo thing? I’m honestly so ignorant about voodoo, they could pull a lounge singing mantis made of Rice Krispies Treats out of their ass and I’d be like, huh… must be a voodoo thing. This was actually one of the largest obstacles for me getting into the game. While I value the novelty of the setting and lore and culture, I’m really at odds not knowing anything about it beforehand. You are dealing with a wide assortment of voodoo items and mythos all with… Creole names, I guess. Not any language I speak anyway. Nothing looks familiar either. You can’t just look at something and guess what it does. There are no in game tutorials but there is an in depth manual. However even the manual is questionable.
Gads are special tattoos that allow you to do things like swim in lava or touch hot things. One of the gads called the poinge gad allows you to climb up bloodfalls. In the manual, it just refers to it as the poigne and shows a picture of a claw-like glove saying that it’s a device used to climb bloodfalls. There is no such item in the game. The thing that allows you to climb the bloodfalls is not a physical tool but merely a magical tattoo which grants you that power. Obviously at some point in the game’s production it was planned to be a device because they made a render of it and described it as such but the developers must have changed it to a gad power late in the development and never conferred with the copywriters and print graphics people. Kind of funny.
There are items you can and can’t use in Liveside versus Deadside. In Deadside, your handgun turns into a soul gun that shoots shrieking wraiths and grows with your power. In Liveside, if you die, you go to Deadside. In Deadside if you die, you go to the entrance of the area you’re in. You’re essentially immortal. In Deadside, you can be under lava and blood without needing to breathe. If you’re in Liveside, you can’t hold your breath for longer than about five fucking seconds and then you die instantly. You’re basically just a normal guy while in Liveside. Not being able to use mystical voodoo shit in Liveside kind of makes sense but why in the hell can’t I go tearing ass through Deadside while dual wielding an Uzi and a shotgun? In fact if my handgun turns into a soulgun, why can't my other weapons do the same?
Personally, I never even use the voodoo items aside from the projectile shield. I don’t really know that they provide much of an advantage over the soul gun and with aiming and hit detection as iffy as they are, I might as well just mindlessly spam everything with the soul gun’s infinite ammo versus running down the voodoo meter until it’s empty when I need it for something.
For voodoo weapons You have the asson which shoots fire, the baton which shoots fire, the flambeau which shoots fire, the calabash which explodes and shoots fire and the marteau which is a jawbone… that shoots fire. Can you say redundant? Most of these things have an alternate purpose to interact with specific things in the environment. The asson, however, is completely pointless. It does nothing that the other things can’t do. One of the many barriers opened with specific items you’ll find around is the bloody sheet which you have to open by burning with the flambeau. Seriously? I have five fucking weapons that make fire and only one of them is acceptable to use to burn something? Not to mention that I could easily get through a sheet with a non voodoo operated pocket knife. Hell, maybe even a stiff breeze would be enough to do it in. The gads, except for the climbing one, all have to do with fire as well, touching hot things with your hands, walking on embers and even swimming in lava. You would think that once you have all of those abilities, fire hazards in general would be pretty much irrelevant but no. I can be submerged in molten rock but a flame the size of a campfire still hurts me. Dumb.
It could be that I’m playing the Playstation version of the game using the backwards compatibility of the PS3 but the engine and animations will shit the bed on a regular basis, leaving me frozen in place while in combat but that’s okay because it probably happens twice as often to enemies. Sometimes I’ll get frozen in a specific pose but will still be able to move or rather slide across the ground. My favorite is the mid stride freeze because it looks like you’re doing Gumby’s one-footed slide when you move.
Enemies without projectiles almost never hurt you. They may come flail at you but rarely do they actually manage to hit you. They pose nearly zero threat. They are basically just there to annoy you. Ninety-five percent of the time you die it’s because you fell in lava… and didn’t have gads.
Ignoring the hub, the levels are divided into three different types, temples, thematic places within Asylum and places in the living world. The temples all supposedly have themes like fire and life but those names would be equally relevant if they were assigned randomly. Hell, the fire temple has less fire in it than virtually any other temple. All of these places are formulaically designed to piss you off. Every one of them has a special spot with a particularly long and tedious platforming segment over instant death lava. If you make one mistake, (or the platforming is just shit,) you die and go back to the beginning of the temple. You will do every segment enough times to perform it flawlessly or quit the game. That’s the deal. There is actually one spot in the Blood Temple where in the middle of platforming, you have to jump and hang on a ledge which is iffy at any time but this particular ledge is the only curved one in the game and I guess was too much for them to figure out how to code because it’s glitched, making you let go or even float off to your death before getting in position to jump off. I figured this out in only two wasted trials but it could potentially ruin someone’s week if they don’t catch it. Luckily, the place you are supposed to jump to next is close enough to circumvent the ledge if you line it up perfectly despite the shitty camera. 
The hub world and overall layout of the maps in the game is some of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. It all just seems to be one circuitous path fractally branching out into infinity. The doors which line your path require various amounts of voodoo power to open, (AKA certain amounts of dark souls,) so it’s like advancing in Mario 64 with more stars or Banjo Kazooie with more jiggies. The doors could lead to anything from a level to an important item to just more path. There are no maps at all which means you basically need to memorize all of it but you may not even discover all of it. The first time I went to the Temple of Life, I thought I had cleared it out to the best of my ability. It wasn’t until I went back and really scoured the area that I found a tiny obscure hole which lead to… the temple. Yeah, I hadn’t even been to the damn temple yet. That was just the surrounding area. All levels are like that. You’ll think you’ve explored nearly all of it and then you find a hole after looking for an hour and find out that was just the tip of the iceberg in a confusing labyrinth of a dungeon.
There is a lot of backtracking to places which you couldn’t open or things that you couldn’t use before which is horrible. Hey, remember that one thing in that one spot in that one area you passed by eight hours ago? No. No, I don’t and you should feel ashamed for even suggesting that someone might. Still not as shitty as Banjo Tooie though. Is it too much to ask that I can just go into an area and do it and then forget about it and move on?
The pacing of the game kind of sucks. The first 80% of the game is just spent running around wherever, amassing dark souls and collecting the three objects for the eclipse ritual which makes the world dark so that you can use your powers in the living world. Then you do what is practically a boss rush of five serial killers before getting to fight Legion. I mentioned that one of these guys is Jack the Ripper but I don’t know any of these other guys who seem to be just contemporary murderers locked up in present day Gardelle Prison. I thought these were supposed to be like supreme dark souls or something. How is it that they all not only all occupy the same time period but the same country and prison? Seems like a huge cop out. You already used one historical figure. Why not use Pol Pot or Caligula or Vlad the Impaler or Dr. Mengele? The Zodiac Killer. He was also a serial killer that was never caught just like Jack. The list of dark souls in the world is not short. Give it more relevance like the boss fights in Clive Barker’s Jericho. That would be a lot more interesting.
Respectively Deadside and Liveside are also the parts where you collect voodoo weapons versus real world guns which only happens at the end of the game. Consolidating everything together in big chunks like this feels unnatural and really burns you out. Imagine playing a Zelda game and doing nothing but running around in between dungeons with no clear or immediate motivation until you reach the end of the game where you fight all the bosses. Also nearly all of the cut scenes of exposition and plot development are dialogue with Jaunty or Nettie which you have to go seek out to see. Some people don’t give a shit about cut scenes but I do, especially when I don’t know what the fuck is going on most of the time but I don’t want to have to continually go visiting characters, hoping they have something new to say. Now that I’m thinking about it, if this game was made today they would likely solve the lack of exposition and the gameplay cluelessness by having Jaunty hide in your pants to go with you or be a voice in your head to explain shit which would essentially make him Atlas from Bioshock. Slashers! Give ‘em the one two paunch! Shoot ‘em and… shoot ‘em some more.
Things that made this game stand out, aside from the setting, were having a black protagonist and his dialogues and monologues. Every time you enter a new area, Shadow Man gives you a personal account of his thoughts and fears whilst reacting to his wretched surroundings and what comes out is as hauntingly visceral as James Earl Jones reading excerpts from Dante’s Inferno. Then there is the flip side where Shadow Man talks shit to every boss he comes across which is equally entertaining.
The creepiest part in the game, (at least for me,) was the reanimated headless bodies of the prisoners in Gardelle. They remind me of the headcrab victims in Half-Life. My biggest gripe is the freezing, which might have everything to do with the PS3's virtual console, but the bland environments is a close second. I guess this game did well enough to spawn a sequel on the PS2. Maybe if it's cheap, I'll get it.
