Shadow Mansion is a short horror experience developed by an equally small team of three people available for a cheap price on Steam right now. I was given the code by the developers but as always my review will be unbiased and honest.
Upon opening the game the impressions weren’t great with the standard text menus and the background animations were choppy and sluggish suggesting Shadow Mansion wasn’t optimised correctly. After some tinkering in the menus I was able to get the framerate to behave however.
There is very little backstory to Shadow Mansion. I can’t recall the player having a name, but the game starts a you are driving to your family’s mansion which you have inherited after your parents death. Upon arrival, things are instantly creepy with broken windows and evidence of squatters in the garages/sheds.
It being the middle of the night, I would have noped right out of there till morning, but “Johnny Sensible” decides to climb in the back window to explore. What followed was ninety minutes of adrenaline and anxiety as we tried to uncover the mysterious circumstances surrounding your parents death and their acquisition of the mansion.
Off the bat, Shadow Mansion isn’t a looker. I suspect a lot of bought assets were used for game models and environment. There was also a suspiciously gen-AI-looking loading screen and whoever decided to paint all the walls the same colour of red deserves to step on all the Lego. Even so, I stuck with it and I’m glad I did.
There are notes scattered about the place giving hints of where to go,. Items are used automatically, so there’s no need for inventory. And the red wall eventually gave way to stone basements massively helping me map the area and feeling nicer on the eyes.
There are, of course, scares throughout the game. When I first saw the warning, I thought, “Oh another jump scare game” but no, Shadow Mansion proved me wrong. They were used sparingly, letting you relax and almost forget about them before ramping up the tension again. Plus, they didn’t linger on screen for long, just being enough to go, “What was that?” as you clutch your chest.
Helping this was the sound design. The ambient noise throughout Shadow Mansion never settled. The odd creak here; a little knock there. Some of the scares were solely auditory with loud knocking or one time a whisper in my ear… It really creeped me out that one did.
Our main character’s voice acting is not great however as he doesn’t seem to be in the same situation as the player with him calmly saying his lines and only reacting scared a couple of times. There are other actors but they were so infrequent and only said one or two lines either reciting notes or the aforementioned whisper in the ear.
The puzzles mostly boiled down to “find the note with the answer”. This was kind of disappointing, especially as I missed one note and spent ages overthinking the answer only to find the note later and feeling quite silly.
However, it was the atmosphere that sold me over to Shadow Mansion. I was on edge the entire time and will remember the experience for quite a while.
If you can look past the obvious shortcomings and the issues that come with being a first time developer you will discover a fantastic little horror experience for cheaper than a cup of coffee.
Developer: NEBULA NOVA GAMES
Publisher: NEBULA NOVA GAMES
Platform: Steam
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