Thank you Evan Weber for sending us a copy of this game!

Shadow Spell Saga: The Winds of Fate is a turn-based strategy RPG in the vein of classic Fire Emblem. In fact, if you want the TL;DR for this entire review, then SSS is Fire Emblem from soup to nuts, with the same medieval-ish time period and setting, grid-based top-down approach to combat, Rock-Paper-Scissors weapon advantage triangle, character stats, support mechanic, classes, magic, item management, weapon durability, and unit permadeath. In other words, this solo developer saw Fire Emblem, loved it, made his own, and did a pretty good job of it, too.

The basic premise of Shadow Spell Saga is this: You control Landon, Prince of the Empire Grenheim, son to Emperor Marduk. Marduk is a cruel and iron-fisted ruler, while Landon, raised primarily by his mother, values justice and peace. Landon is sent to the north with a band of soldiers to bring peace to a local village. Unbeknownst to Landon, all but Landon's personal bodyguard and retainers have been told to violently put down the local unrest by murdering the innocent villagers as a message to the other, more restless villages that no dissent, no matter how small, will by tolerated by the Empire. Seeing this act of abject cruelty and evil by his own kingdom spurs Landon to action: he betrays the Empire, fights his father's soldiers, and eventually flees the continent. During his journey, he cannot help but to stop every time he sees people in mortal peril, and ends up befriending many people and uniting many disparate kingdoms that all want to see Marduk's tyrannical rule end.

The game takes place in a medieval-like setting, where technology has not progressed beyond steel blacksmithing, while horses and walking are still the primary means of travel. The usual weaponry is on display: swords, spears, axes, and bows, as well as elemental, light, and dark tomes for spellcasting and staves for healing. Shadow Spell Saga also includes a dagger weapon type, which a small handful of units can use and essentially act as thrown swords. Finally, there are a number of trinkets that units can carry that passively improve their stats or protect them from certain forms of damage.

The types of weapons a unit can use are entirely dependent on their class, and the level of the weapons they can wield are dependent on their weapon level stat. Units gain experience when in combat, gaining a level for every 100 experience points they accumulate, usually to a maximum level of 20. Starting at level 10, basic units can change classes to a more advanced class with the help of certain items that are unique to each basic unit type. For example, a Cavalier (a horse-rider that can wield spears and swords) can use the Cavalier Banner item to change classes into either a Paladin or a Vanguard Knight. Beyond stat and weapon differences, each unit also has access to one or two skills and may differ in how many squares they can move or what kind of terrain they can easily move through.

And of course, it wouldn't be a Fire Emblem-style game without unit support. When two units fight near each other over the course of battle, they will gain the ability to Talk to one another on the battlefield, resulting in a short exchange that gives insight into the characters' personalities. When two supporting units are adjacent on the battlefield, they boost some of each others' stats. Unlike the Fire Emblem games I have personally played, however, it seems like simply having two units on the battlefield together is enough to move them towards their support dialog, rather than having to fight adjacent to one another. What's more, when setting up for battle, if you've selected units that have reached the point where they can Talk to one another, there is a menu screen called "Talk Event" which shows you which units in your current loadout are ready to Talk. Units that can support one another have 3 support levels, with each level increasing the stat boost provided to their partner. As a final note, with the exception of the two main protagonists, none of the dialog options that I stumbled upon were romantic in nature aside from some simple "You should tell her how you feel" talk. Instead, support is more about rapport, friendship, and comradery.

Shadow Spell Saga has multiple difficulty settings. On the easier settings, units that die in battle come back after the battle is over with no real consequences. However, in the harder difficulty settings, a unit that dies stays dead permanently. The only way to get them back is to exit the game and load back in before the death occurred. Games can usually only be saved while outside of battle, with a Suspend option for a single "quick save" that gets erased the moment the player resumes. However, this game also offers a unique item called a Prayer Book that has a durability of 10 and can be used during battle to create a save. There are also some Temples and gravestones on some maps that offer the player a single save.

When I first started playing, I thought Shadow Spell Saga was actually pretty easy compared to a typical Fire Emblem game. However, during the last 5 or so chapters, I had an incredibly difficult time keeping all of my units alive until the end. I have and always will refuse to play on the easier difficulty settings, which meant I spent a lot of time restarting those last chapters to undo one of my unit's deaths. While the play time in game shows a 16 hour playthrough, my overall time as shown in Steam was much closer to 40 hours. Of course, I could have just let Prince Landon solo every map if I wanted to; by the final level, he had higher defenses than any other unit and a unique skill that gives him a chance to heal whatever damage he deals during combat.

Shadow Spell Saga uses a pixel art style that reminds me of the Gameboy Advance Fire Emblem titles. Units are displayed on the map as small icons that are unique enough to differentiate them. When combat starts, the units then appear as two unique characters who then physically attack each other with their equipped weapons. The player can opt to turn off these battle sequences, with just numbers and health bars appearing over the units' heads and showing the results of the skirmish.

The sprite quality and number of frames in their movement during battles is a little lacking, but I have a soft spot for this presentation over the 3D direction newer Fire Emblem titles are going. There also seemed to be weird discrepancies between the character portraits and the battle sprites for most characters. Usually, this took the form of differences in hair color. During the credits, it is noted that some of the art assets used for this game were AI-generated, and that may have had something to do with it. I know using AI for art is a touchy subject these days, but keep in mind that the entire game was developed by a single person and who likely did not have any kind of budget outside of his own free time.

Music and sound are also just decent. There aren't a ton of music tracks, and they change rather abruptly when going between the battle map and battle scenes or when the story calls for a shift in tone, but the tracks fit the scenes relatively well. Sound effects are a bit low-quality, sounding like they belong in a SNES-era Fire Emblem rather than a modern title, but it works well enough given the fact that seems like the aesthetic Shadow Spell Saga is going for.

Controls for Shadow Spell Saga are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, you could play this entire game with nothing but the mouse in one hand, which is pretty cool. Left-click is confirm, right-click is cancel, the mouse wheel scrolls through multiple options or pages, and the pointer can be enabled to move the selector for selecting any menu item. If you're not careful, though, it's very easy to misclick. Clicking on the empty space NEXT to the unit you want to select or clicking on a unit that has already taken their action for the turn brings up the combat menu. The first item in the combat menu is "End Turn", which gets auto-selected by default, and before you realize it, you've ended a turn when you meant to command a unit to attack. The game can also be controlled with a keyboard, but nowhere in game is there a menu that tells you which keys perform which actions. This also means there is no way to remap the controls. Further, there is no native controller support, so you'll have to go through the multi-step process of first experimenting with the keyboard to figure out what keys do what, then go through Steam to create a controller layout just for this game in order to play with a controller instead of just a mouse.

You very likely don't want to be playing this on a TV rather than at a monitor anyway. Whether it's a limitation of the engine being used or lack of expertise on the part of the developer, the game doesn't have any way to increase or decrease resolution manually. This means multiple things: First, if the map you're currently on isn't big enough to fill up your screen in one or both dimensions, there is just a permanent black band around the map. Second, if you're playing further away from the screen, like I tend to by playing on my couch, then there is no way to zoom in and out in order to make it easier to see the grid and the details of what units are on the battlefield. Once I realized that there was no way to fix this in-game, I played the rest of the time from my desk setup. If you're playing on an ultrawide monitor, I expect most maps will have very large bands of black emptiness on the sides for most of your playthrough.

As someone who has played 4 or 5 Fire Emblem games myself, there are just a few conveniences and improvements that those games have that I really would have liked to see here. The biggest one for me is, in Fire Emblem games, you can select one or more enemy units to create an outline on the map showing the total range those units will be able to reach and attack during the next Enemy Phase. There is also usually a button that toggles that outline for all enemies on and off. In Shadow Spell Saga, you can click or hover over an enemy unit to see their range, but you must cancel the selection before you can do anything else, like move one of your units, and you can't toggle that outline on for multiple enemy units at once. It makes planning your next move a little more difficult than it could be. Shadow Spell Saga also doesn't have a way for you to use class changing items while at a base outside of battle. I found this to be a really strange omission, because the game gives you the ability to use stat boosting items out of battle. It even has a Bonus EXP mechanic where fulfilling certain conditions will net you Bonus EXP that you can then distribute however you like to your units while at a base. All that to say, there are clearly mechanisms outside of combat for using items and handling level ups and stat changes, so I don't understand why you can only use class changing items in battle.

The game did have some minor stability issues when I first started playing, with a bug in chapter 10 keeping me from being able to finish the level. However, the game's Discussions page on Steam has a pinned discussion labelled "Observations, Bugs & Requests" that the developer actively monitors. I reported my bug there, he asked for some clarification, and the bug was patched out the very next day. Beyond that, I encountered a strange instance where an enemy unit on the battlefield became invisible, which is something I never saw a second time. Another oddity is the game exit function performed by pressing the "Esc" key. Pressing it brings up a dialog box that says "%s verification failed", with the selectable choices being "Thinking" and "Surprise"; choosing "Thinking" closes the game. Finally, there are a couple typos in the dialog, like an instance of "and and" I saw during the "where are they now?" segment that is typical to Fire Emblem's endings.

Morally, Shadow Spell Saga is not bad, at least from what I saw. For starters, there is hardly any foul language to speak of, with the worst I saw being "dang" or "heck". Violence is typical of turn-based RPGs, where you enter the command and watch as your unit fights with the enemy unit. There is no blood visible during combat, and when a unit dies, they simply disappear. For sexual content, I saw a single enemy unit wearing an unusually revealing outfit (unusual both because no other units in the game are dressed this way and because they are a named NPC whose portrait really does not match her battle screen depiction). However, given the pixelated style of the game, and given this one character only appears briefly, it isn't too bad. There is RPG-style magic in Shadow Spell Saga, and both ally and enemies can use "dark" magic along with elemental and light magic. There are some undead enemy units the player encounters, too. However, the enemies do at one point perform some kind of "blood ritual" that is decried by everyone else in the game as being heretical, and performing it comes with a long list of possible debilitating side effects if it goes wrong.

Finally, this game centers around a corrupt emperor and requires the player to actively fight against the ruling authority in order to restore justice. As stated earlier, Prince Landon is wholly incapable of watching injustice occur without stepping in to resolve it. He may be rebelling against authority, but that authority is his own father who is very black-and-white, capital E evil. It also came as a bit of a surprise that the developer appears to be a Christian, with the primary in-game religion centering around God, humility, and shunning evil. The credits end with a slight variation of the Berean Standard Bible's version of Psalm 146:3-4: "Put not your faith in princes, In mortal men who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; On that very day their plans come to nothing."

As a small caveat, because of the nature of support conversations and the fact that there are some branching storylines in the game, I probably only saw about one third of all possible dialog options and definitely missed a large handful of NPCs entirely. The game helpfully gives you a glossary showing the player all of the dialog and NPCs they have discovered as well as showing "???" spaces for every one they haven't. For those who love getting all of the unit supports, Shadow Spell Saga definitely has some replay value.

At the end of the day, how much I can recommend Shadow Spell Saga: The Winds of Fate to any reader will very much depend on what it is about the average Fire Emblem game they like. If pixelated graphics, low frame rate sprites, the occasional bug, or less than perfect controls are deal-breakers, this might not be for you. For me personally, though, I absolutely loved this game. I thought the characters were all very unique and fleshed out, the classes and their unique skills were fun to experiment with and try, and I got very attached to my core contingent of soldiers. The game ended for me the way the best strategy RPGs always do: Me with an unstoppable team of snipers, sorcerers, and armor-wearing behemoths marching up to the big bad evil guy. I think Evan Weber did a phenomenal job for a one man team in bringing the setting and characters to life and delivering on the core experience that make strategy RPGs so fun. The game is only $9.99 at full price, and as of this writing is on sale for $6.99. If you're a big strategy RPG fan, show this solo Christian developer some love; the game's absolutely worth the price.

-maestro_dana