I often say my goal is to get through as much of my game backlog as I can before the heat death of the universe. Today, under the Backlog Busting microscope, is a game that requires you to bring about a different, probably much less pleasant kind of apocalypse. What we’ve got here is Shadows of Forbidden Gods, developed by Bobby Two Hands and published by Forbidden Oak Games. Its title gives away almost all of its core gameplay loop: You play as one of a selection of said forbidden gods and strive to cover the world in shadow.

Well, that’s actually not entirely true. For a good chunk of each game, you mainly play as the worshipers (called “Agents”) of your chosen forbidden god, as you are (at first) much too weak to appear on the mortal plane. You initially have one or two Agents who will do your bidding until enough time has passed that all the seals keeping your selected malevolent deity locked away are broken. As more and more seals break, you’ll grow powerful enough to recruit additional Agents even before you’re totally freed and ready to wreak havoc upon the world.

If you plan optimally, your Agents will ideally have corrupted the world enough during the time needed to break those seals that it’ll be much easier for you to bring about the end once you’re strong enough. Shadows of Forbidden Gods is a turn-based strategy game in much the same vein as Plague, Inc. In both games, you have the same ultimate goal of exterminating all life on Earth, but Shadows of Forbidden Gods offers you a comparatively much larger toolbox to help you with that. Plagues are just one part of your arsenal as opposed to comprising the entire core gameplay loop.

The map in each game of Shadows of Forbidden Gods will be dotted with human settlements, including villages, towns, cities, abbeys, and the like. There will also be encampments of orcs whom you can recruit to your side if you know what you’re doing. Orcs and humans generally hate each other anyway, so allying yourself with some of them can help you with your goal of exterminating all humans while simultaneously drawing the humans’ attention away from your cult. Clicking on any human settlement will tell you what it contains and, thus, what shenanigans you can cause there.

You can send your agents to human settlements and have them do several types of nefarious things. For example, if you send an agent to a village of farmers, you can have your agents infiltrate that community. That will both reduce the security stat of the village, making it less defensible against attacks, and allow you access to new shenanigans that will weaken all other settlements linked to that farm. You can have your agents steal food from the farm you just had them infiltrate, which will cause food shortages that affect every settlement whose food comes from that farm.

Food shortages will cause humans to flee to larger settlements like cities, thus concentrating larger populations of humans in fewer places. Food shortages that go on for long enough will eventually lead to famines, which in turn make human settlements more vulnerable to disease due to malnutrition. If you send an agent to a city that has a vast sewer system, your agents can cultivate a plague in those sewers and then work to help the disease spread. I think you see the pattern: You start by issuing your agents more innocuous orders that then allow them to cause more and more chaos over time.

Victory conditions in Shadows of Forbidden Gods all have the end result of you and your cult eliminating all humans on the map. You have multiple ways of achieving this, however. You can do that by more conventional means like plagues and wars, you can have your followers spread the shadow of your chosen god throughout the land, or some combination of both. The latter option will eliminate most of humanity and enslave any survivors. Annoyingly, those pesky humans aren’t exactly happy about you trying to either wipe them out or enslave them, so they’re going to fight back.

There will be several so-called “heroes” among the humans spread out across the map. These heroes are usually gallant knights who will work to stamp out your cult’s activity wherever they find it. One such hero will be designated as “the Chosen One,” who has the power to form alliances between human heroes and kingdoms. Of course, the more members that join such an alliance, the harder it’ll be for your cult to wipe out humanity. That’s why you want to have your agents work in the shadows much of the time unless it’s necessary for them to expose their deeds.

Your agents can create “Wells of Shadow” in human settlements you’ve had them infiltrate. So long as the humans don’t destroy Wells of Shadow, they’ll slowly corrupt the settlement where they’re established and spread that corruption to nearby settlements. Human territories and their leaders can be corrupted by the shadow. When any human leader has been fully claimed by the shadow, they’ll do everything they can to help your cult and will refuse to join any alliances with other humans. As you might imagine, you ideally want to corrupt as many leaders as you can and then prevent them from losing their power.

I said earlier that Shadows of Forbidden Gods has a lot in common with Plague Inc. I quite like Plague Inc., and I think Shadows of Forbidden Gods has an excellent premise and gameplay concept. Unfortunately, that’s why I’m so disappointed in Shadows of Forbidden Gods. It has a lot of potential, and it could have been a great game, but it’s too severely hampered by its negative aspects. For one thing, the entirety of the UI in Shadows of Forbidden Gods looks and feels “under-baked,” for lack of a better word. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.

The core gameplay loop within Shadows of Forbidden Gods is entirely mouse-controlled and text-based, and all its interfaces appear almost painfully basic. That’s especially true because the vast majority of in-game text I’ve seen is in bog-standard fonts that you’d find in any version of Microsoft Word. That’s not a mortal sin by itself, but it’s also disappointing that a lot of that text is in boxes that look like they were created with the shape tools in Microsoft Paint. The gameplay’s heavy reliance on text also means I have to get back on my soapbox yet again, unfortunately.

If you’ve read nearly any of my reviews within the past year or so, you can probably already guess what I’m about to bring up: I’ve noticed several errors in in-game text within Shadows of Forbidden Gods. When I noticed that the word “it’s” was incorrectly used instead of “its” in the first menu I reached after clicking “start game,” my spirits started to sink right away. The grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors didn’t stop there, I’m afraid. If any game relies as heavily on text as Shadows of Forbidden Gods does, I would put heavy emphasis on carefully proofreading all that text.

The music in Shadows of Forbidden Gods is also lackluster and repetitive. In fairness, though, at least the music isn’t also boisterous enough to be annoying on top of that. Considering the developer is “Bobby Two Hands,” I suspect this was a solo project as opposed to having a huge team of experienced developers behind Shadows of Forbidden Gods. That’s why I’m really trying not to be too harsh and give credit where it’s due while still explaining why I feel so let down by it. With more polish and attention to detail, this title could have been great.

Since I’m operating under standard Backlog Busting rules, I stopped playing Shadows of Forbidden Gods after two hours. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time to really grab me before I started writing this review. Its central ideas are excellent in theory, but poorly executed in practice. I get the sense that much of Shadows of Forbidden Gods, especially in terms of its UI and music, is actually placeholder material that was never improved before the game’s release. I can only recommend Shadows of Forbidden Gods if you find it considerably discounted because it doesn’t justify its $20 base price.

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Shadows of Forbidden Gods

$19.99

5.5

Score

5.5/10

Pros

• Fascinating core gameplay concept.

Cons

• Clunky, under-baked UI.
• Repetitive music.
• Frequent mistakes in in-game text.
• Poor execution of an otherwise great idea.