Pieces of work that revolve around time travel are usually prone to
commit a few inherent flaws. First is the slapstick sci-fi quality
where works will present the most hackneyed explanations in the need for
time travel. This is the dreadful mad scientist storyline we have all
come to loathe. Others, on the other hand, don't take advantage of time
travel. It's as if traveling through time is second nature, as easy as
opening a jar of peanut butter; which takes away from the freshness of
the concept and often, the supporting drama isn't convincing on its own
anyway. Shadow of Destiny is a rare piece that finds a balance between
making time travel believable and time travel a necessity to the plot.
It is intelligent and thought provoking in a way that it doesn't insult
the audience's acumen.
You assume the role of Eike Kusch, a dweller in a small European town
with cobblestone streets, market plazas, and sturdy stone buildings.
Eike, as he is known throughout the storyline, has a strange problem as
you will see in the onset. He keeps getting himself killed from no fault
of his own. Why, who and how these deaths happen will be up to you to
find out. But how does Eike continue the story if he is killed at the
beginning of every chapter? In his afterlife, Eike awakens in a dreary
room in the presence of a being known as Homunculus, who endows Eike with a
Digipad that lets him travel through time. The catch is he can only
travel to certain times and at certain moments. After that, Eike is let
out unto the city again, in his attempt to thwart death in the present
time at an appointed hour. As you slowly work your way through the
plot, you'll delay your death by minutes, hours and finally, an entire
day, such that the killer or cause of killing will be negated.
Because of this inherent feature, you're bound to experience some déjà
vu. Shadow of Destiny is a cinematic story with much of the scenes
playing out in a passive spectator role. However, it handles this quite
well. If you die and you talk to the same people, déjà vu sequences can
be skipped, so you'll be able to keep track of things. Just the same
though, Eike will undergo multiple deaths and through each
death, he'll be able to develop clairvoyance into the future such that
the next time you meet a certain character, you may already know what
they're about to say and for good measure, Eike knows too.
That is the key strength you are endowed with that your enemy does not
have. Each chapter begins with a cause for death. You'll be maimed,
shot, stabbed or run over and short of tripping over your own two feet,
you're destined to die at the appointed hour. Homunculus even jokes at
one point when Eike is stabbed from the back, "What about putting
something like an iron plate under your clothing?" Without giving too
much away, each death happens because of an X condition. At which
point, your job is to travel back in time and do everything you can,
talk to people or change events to prevent X condition from happening in
the future. As you progress though, the conditions of your death will
require you to travel between increasingly lengthier times and the cause
or condition for your death in the present may not be as clear. A
slight change of things in the past, even many centuries ago, may
prevent your death; chaos theory, par excellence.
To be able to think in four dimensions is tough according to Stephen
Hawking. He humbly states that he has enough trouble piecing out
problems in the third dimension. But the fourth dimension is what
Shadow of Destiny challenges you with. Some of the solutions to your
problems are very subtle and clever. For example, at one point, a
falling object kills Eike. Note how the solution to the problem is not
to beat up the object or wear a helmet but to discover something about
someone's past and reveal it to them, causing them to break the object
out of shock or dismay. It's done so neatly that you have to think back
through the events to figure it out. Another incident requires you to
talk to yourself and like the recent film Frequency, instruct your past
to do something for the present. In this sense, Shadow of Destiny is
very different from North American adventure titles. Its concept
challenges you to do more than merely chatting your way through forked
conversations to solve puzzles. And it definitely is not one where you
merely mix and match inventory to objects, like a burglar's ring of keys
to keyholes.
The story is fleshed out more by some capable voice acting. Although at
times, it is sorely in need of Hollywood talent, the numerous characters
you meet are enigmatic, engaging and memorable. However, it is not on
the order of titles like Grim Fandango or Planescape: Torment. Those
featured characters (and voices) that had more affability; the former in
humor, the latter in depth. The one I fell in love with most was the
sinister Homunculus character, who assumes an attractive feminine form
but is endowed with a synthesized yet effeminate voice that reminded me
of the Shodan character in the System Shock series. Her speech is at
once ominous and scintillatingly seductive. Visually, Shadow of Destiny
suffers from the low resolution of being a console title. While you can
play it out in higher resolutions, some animated sequences, like time
travel, remain pixilated. But all in all, Shadow of Destiny possesses
an appealing style. It's not overly based on overseas anime and has a
naturalistic look to it. The character models are well animated, save
for stiff arms. There's good use of lighting. Look closely at the
library's windows during daytime. Fade and motion blur effects are used
fruitfully for time shifting sequences. Moreover, the artists exercise
great liberty in their work. Medieval times are portrayed in an
off-color brownish tone, including the people. While everyone in the
turn of the (20th) century time are black and white, just like the
photographs.
The only troublesome spot is presenting the initial concept itself.
There's very little explanation on how time travel can be used to thwart
your death. In the beginning, you're fenced into a relatively
restricted space, guarded by 'dogs' at every alley. It would have been
much easier to guide new players through their first four dimension
problem solving and have them go from there. Shadow of Destiny is
filled with hints but they, like the nature of the title, are very
subtle. The console-like camera system, which relies exclusively on the
keyboard or gamepad, is hard to get used to too.
Shadow of Destiny works so well because it is told entirely within a
closed world. That's why we are able to look over the constant
loopholes that Eike generates, despite his adamant refusal to alter too
much from the past. In the present, you'll meet an old man who dreams
of doing a movie only to be able to travel back in time and remind him
of his moviemaking dreams. However, there are some peculiarities, like
the fact that the story makes the assumption that everyone lives in the
same hamlet as they did for centuries. While that may actually be the
case in class-restricted Europe (more foreign to us in the relatively
new North America), such details are insignificant to the story as are
the medieval people who are able to say 'OK'.
In Japan, I'm told that there isn't much of a Hollywood for creative
minds to go to. So when creative minds get an incredible idea, instead
of making a film, they proceed to make a game. That adage plays very
strongly in influencing this title. Very cinematic in nature, Shadow of
Destiny encourages replaying by offering at least half a dozen endings
and the opportunity to travel back in time to fix more pedestrian
problems. Its magic and charm is in its problem solving, on the order
of the fourth dimension: time. It weaves this often-problematic device
so well into the plot that the two are seamlessly meshed together to
provide, ceteris paribus, one of the most compelling adventures released
this year.