Card-RPG Shadowhand shuffles into release
A Solitaire'y pursuit
Shadowhand from Regency Solitaire developer Grey Alien Games is out now, offering a unique blend of card-battling and corsets. You can take a deeper look at the game below via a short Making Of video, featuring half of the husband & wife duo behind the game in a fetching tricorne hat.
The game aims to blend Magic: The Gathering-style card battling with equal parts solitaire and RPG-style fine-tuning of equipment and character builds, with the latter directly reflected in your deck composition in a way similar to the excellent Card Hunter. One minor complaint that I have heard is that if you're unlucky on the solitaire side of things, combat can slow down with neither combatant able to do much, but this seems to be a relatively rare event. We'll have a review with first-hand thoughts from Brendan next week.
In practice the game alternates between pure solitaire 'puzzle' levels where you attempt to clear the board of cards with the aid of some special character abilities, and the more RPG-like combat stages, where you try to clear the board to charge up your attacks and whittle away at your opponent's health bar. In the video above, you can see just how much time and attention has gone into the fine-tuning of the game, with custom AI routines allowing for brute-force testing of scenarios to determine what skills may be overpowered.
Shadowhand is available on Steam, GOG and Humble or direct from the developers for around £11.39/$15, minus whatever initial discounts are on offer. The developer notes that due to Steam restrictions, it's not allowed to participate in the Winter sale, so the current 10% launch-week discount is the best it's going to get for now.