Ereban: Shadow Legacy's blend of Splatoon and Assassin's Creed releases in April
Third-person stealth shenanigans ahoy
Stealth games in which you can become "one with the shadows" cover a wide range, though I guess spectrum is the more appropriate word here. You've got sober infiltration games like Thief, which metes out gradations of light and dark with the care of somebody calculating their tax expenses, and stylised affairs such as Mark Of The Ninja, in which stepping into shadow desaturates you and sort of makes your character far too fancy for enemies to notice.
There are games such as Splinter Cell, in which hiding in shadows rests on a gentleman's agreement with NPCs not to perceive the big green torches attached to Sam Fisher's head. And then you have games like Ereban: Shadow Legacy, which has just been given a release date - 10th April. In this mystical third-person stealth-platformer, your character can literally disintegrate and travel through shadows as a ripple of dark energy - a transformation that puts me in mind less of Thief than of squid-mode in Nintendo's Splatoon.
The first game from Baby Robot Games, Ereban casts you as Ayana - sorcerous blademaster and wielder of high tech gadgets, who is travelling through a desolate, sci-fantasy world of abandoned cities and temples that have been upgraded into high tech bases. She's the last descendant of a forgotten race, and is on the run from a villainous energy corporation, Helios, while investigating the mysteries of her past. Her signature ability, shadow merge, lets her sink into the floor and travel horizontally and vertically as long as she's in darkness.
According to Baby Robot Games, the game does, in fact, take inspiration from Splatoon on this count, so in your face, people who cringed at the headline. Other explicit inspirations include Metal Gear, Aragami and, yep, Assassin's Creed. See, I'm not just in the business of forcing comparisons! I'm also in the business of smug little asides to readers, when I should be telling you about the game's setting.
While I wouldn't call it open world, Ereban's setting appears nicely open-ended, with lots of elevations and sideroutes to exploit while evading or assassinating Helios drones equipped with spotlights. Sometimes, though, it's more like an abstract puzzler, with Ayana manipulating objects such as boxes on conveyor belts to create short-lived dark spots. There's also a sequence in which Ayana has to weave a path through shadows thrown by whirring cogs. As for plot, the Steam page makes a big deal of the game being "morally grey", inviting you to "define your shadow legacy" by, say, not murdering everybody you encounter. It's a familiar premise - I'm more sold on the fluidity of the animations and the mucky splendour of the levels.
Ereban will be available on Steam and Epic Games Store, and again, it's out 10th April. "When we started this adventure 5 years ago, we couldn't imagine that what started as a love letter to stealth games would grow this much and turn into such a solid project," Baby Robot write in the release date announcement post. "It has been a long and difficult journey, pandemic included, but after a lot of love and effort we are finally here. It is a dream come true that this is going to be our first game for many of us." Best of luck, all - speaking as somebody who pines for the era of actual stealth game "blockbusters" like Splinter Cell, I'm keen for this to do well.