Shadow Tower acts as the connection between King's Field's dark medieval aesthetic and Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use of naturalistic atmosphere to convey a sense of being in a greater world, which the player just happens to stumble upon. And as such, leaves the player wondering what the hell is going on as the story is very, very fragmented and clumsy.
The gameplay mechanics do one step forward, one backwards. The hit detection is sometimes laughable, but the enemy bestiary is wicked and bizarre. The repair and durability systems are enticing, yet making the rings breakable seems like a jarring move to annoy the player more than an usable combat option, as you actually don't really use magic that much. The backtracking required to get your stuff on foot again makes this oniric journey establish a sense of world building with no major irkness, but some maps themselves are quite annoying in retrospect. The leveling system is quite straightforward and suits one part of the experience really well, but the inclusion of Soul Pods is completely unnecessary and seems like a cope out for the amount of enemies' abuse of Acid and Paralysis states. Geez.
There is a weird dichotomy on Shadow Tower: it certainly wants to be a more combat-driven experience (even more than King's Field) by removing NPC dialog and rest hubs and creating a "collectionist" type of bestiary, yet it also wants to be a survival horror game with item and damage management. It doesn't converge in something entirely round, but it is a pretty unique, albeit sometimes too cryptic experience. Nice spin-off to the KF formula, and there are not that many games like this out there.
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This is the perfected form of the King's Field series. You can see how From took a lot of the ideas here and implemented them very effectively in Demon's Souls.
I adore the enemy design here, they're all so weird and off the wall, most memorable ones being those flowers that shoot OP magic attacks that can hit you thought the walls and make extremely unsettling noises, and those weird capsule things that attack you instantly when you enter the room. They really pushed it with the durability system, and I think it makes for an amazingly interesting mechanic where you have to adapt to using multiple weapons and armor to survive. The fact that the poison swam area damages your boots the highest is a great example. I wish they implemented something as bold in the Souls series, where durability is simply an annoyance. I don't remember anything special about the leveling system, seemed pretty straightforward to me. And the fact that they used HP as currency, such a fantastic idea they never explored in later titles.
The lack of music makes the whole experience much more harrowing and gives it an almost survival horror tone. The ambient/monster noises really got to me when taken together with how easy it is to suddenly die, break your weapon or armor, and all the dangers the game throws at you. Really effective at creating a bleak and decaying atmosphere.
This feels like a tech demo for a really good dungeon crawler. I like the durability system, the atmosphere, and some of the little moments it sets up for you intermittently, but the complete absence of any story, lore or context for anything in-game, the agonizingly slow pace, the aimless feel of most of the level design, and the sheer number of mechanics and core systems that go completely unexplained just make it feel like it's not a finished game. A little bit of polish would go an incredibly long way here.
Some of the best creature modelling on the PS1 though, and maybe some of the most original and creative designs in ANY game I've seen. Probably worth a playthrough for the monsters alone.
I've gotta disagree with the story point. Playing through it, I've been getting small narrative bits here and there, that seem to be slowly piecing together a story throughout. Much like the Souls games, it just feels more minimalistic in the way it tackles it: Basic set-up at the start, that gives very vague information, and then breadcrumbs of info throughout, but never giving too terribly much information at any one juncture.