Review - Ereban: Shadow Legacy

Some of my fondest childhood video game memories are running around the park pretending to be Gray Fox from Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (Yes, I know it’s not actually Frank Jaeger and yes, I do mean the horrible Xbox port, I was a kid and didn’t know any better ok?). It is probably the game that I have single-handedly replayed the most.  When I finally was old enough for my own PC, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow was a permanent install. To me, there was nothing more satisfying in gaming than being a ghost. The thrill of sneaking past an entire facility of bad guys without them even knowing you were there in the first place is still to this day, one of my favourite feelings in all of video games. So, to say I like stealth games is a bit of an understatement, which is why when I got to finally play Ereban: Shadow Legacy, I felt right at home in the shadows.

Developed and Published by Baby Robot Games, Ereban: Shadow Legacy is the first outing by the young indie Spanish team (Follow them over on X @BabyRobotGames) who in their own words “want to give back what this industry gave us. Our goal is to create highly enjoyable experiences with original mechanics, strong visuals and compelling stories.” A goal in which I think they’ve succeeded with their debut title.

Ereban (Look, I like the game but I’ve said the full name more than enough times now.) Is quick to the stealth-filled action with only a short introduction setting up the game's world. While I’m usually not a fan of exposition dumping your world's lore, Ereban does it in a clever and quite honestly, fitting way. See, you play as Ayana, the game’s confused protagonist and last of her kind (Gee, I wonder if anything bad will happen to her) who after completing some basic tutorials disguised as operative tests, you wander through a museum exhibition at your own leisure setting the tone of Ereban immediately. Yes, there is a story and world here for you to indulge in if you want to explore, or you can ignore the yapping and get straight to the sneaking, it really is your call. Personally, I enjoyed the lore dumps via museum exhibition and the very frequent lore logs you will find scattered around each mission, but what I enjoy even more than that is sneaking. Thanks to the simple movement mechanics, and access to a one-shot stealth kill, reminiscent of Tenchu, you’ll find that you can approach traversing to your objectives in a number of ways, really rewarding you for not only studying enemy movement, but the movement of shadows in the world and how they wrap around the architecture. So, due to my somewhat obsession with stealth, like a ghost, was how I aimed to tackle my initial playthrough.

Where this game stands out in my eyes, or more specifically, ears, is the game's dialogue. Now I understand that humour is subjective, and there will be people out there who will wholeheartedly disagree with me here, but the dialogue was right up my comedy alley. Initially, I didn’t much like Ayana due to how she interacted with other characters. While I think they were going for blunt, I think it aired just a little bit too much on the side of being a jerk. But once Ayana starts conversing with and overhearing more NPCs, her roughness becomes a fantastic counterbalance to the world's tongue-in-cheek humour. My personal favourite being the SYM’s, the main robotic antagonists in the game that start nearly every sentence by declaring the emotional intent of what they are about to say. Unfortunately, where there is good audio there is also the mediocre to bad. In all honesty, I can’t remember a single tune from the game, which to me is usually an indicator that my brain heard it as nothing more than filler sound. One thing that definitely wasn’t filler sound, however, was the occasionally broken sound effects that would randomly pop in and out of existence. This was most notable in mission five when entering certain cells. While this wasn’t enough to throw me out of the sneaking mood, it was a bit distracting.