TLDR: In Aragami you play as an adept assassin with the ability to manipulate shadows. Aragami is a linear yet open ended stealth game allowing you to tackle missions the way you desire, whether that be a murderous assassin or a sneaky ninja. You get to explore beautiful and stylish landscapes with a charming soundtrack to enjoy. Delve into an intriguing story involving the evil army of Light and help this mysterious girl who has summoned you to this world. Complete with customisation and collectibles, Aragami is a very decent stealth game.



Aragami is a stealth game where you play as a reincarnated spirit, summoned by an imprisoned girl who needs rescuing. It's a third person game, and has a unique game mechanic where you can create and teleport to shadows. You have a nice variety of unique unlockable abilities so you can complete missions in different exciting ways.


Visuals - Aragami features a simple yet aesthetically pleasing visual style. The environments are gorgeous which make it a joy to roam about within them. While detailed and beautiful, the balance of simplicity means there is no visual clutter and thereby enhances the feel of the gameplay. The animations are fluid and effortlessly blend together, making a concatenation of takedowns a blissful sight. Overall I would say that Aragami is a really visually stunning game. I have some pictures here

Audio - The music is nicely orchestrated oriental music. It fits the setting of the game perfectly and allows you to become immersed. In moments of action, the music ramps up to induce adrenaline. While the 'action' music does sound great, you will hear that same song every time which eventually leads to monotony. The sound effects are quite decent though they could be better. The sounds whenever your sword meets flesh is fine but feels too unvaried. Overall the audio of Aragami is really quite good.

Gameplay - In Aragami you have to complete certain objectives within considerably large and open levels. You only need to reach certain areas and acquire certain items; killing optional. The antagonists, the Kaiho, have swords imbued with Light essence. They're a formidable foe that are able to instantly disintegrate you with a swing of their sword. The Kaiho do take effort and planning to take out, in order to avoid alerting nearby enemies. The game gives you decent variety of abilities to help you fight or evade them.

You primary ability is possessing the power to teleport between shadows. Doing this uses Shadow essence which only regenerates when you're within a shadow. Because of this you'll be constantly lurking in and scrounging for shadows as they are an essential component of the gameplay. Your other main ability is the power to create a temporary shadow, so that you may teleport to it. These 2 abilities are the only ones you need, and you'll be using them a lot. Other abilities, such as ranged attacks and going invisible, first require unlocking using skill points acquired from scrolls. Scrolls are hidden throughout each level, but there's an ability which shows you the location of all of them. Each of the special abilities only have 2 charges, but can be replenished by finding a shrine.

I'll also note that there's no health in this game, for enemies or yourself, so every attack will result in an instant kill. There's some special attacks you can accomplish, such as a drop assassination (dropping on an enemy and killing them) and a ledge kill ability (teleport up a ledge next to an enemy to kill them). The gameplay reminds me of Dishonored in a way, and I really enjoyed it.

Story - The game is about an 'Aragami,' a vengeful spirit summoned who has been summoned by Yamiko. She is being held captives by a clan of light adepts known as the Kaiho. The Kaiho had fought against Yamiko's people and killed nearly all of them, taking their land. This game nicely sets up the Kaiho as really evil and malicious people. In order to rescue Yamiko, you need to break the magic seal by finding all 6 talismans. Along the way you'll get the help from a raven which will help you find your objectives. The story also explores existential aspects; the Aragami is a reincarnated person, but what was its previous identity?

Functionality - You'll be pleased to here that this game does come with an FOV slider, which maxes at 90. The performance of this game is stellar, as even with max settings I never experienced any frame drops. Blood is also toggleable if that concerns you. I found this game to be mostly devoid of glitches however there were a few minor annoyances (AI gets stuck sometimes), but nothing gamebreaking.

UX - This game has no HUD which I really liked, so your level of Shadow essence and number Shadow Powers you can use are conveniently displayed on your back. I found the controls to be a bit difficult in this game however. Many actions, such as opening your skill powers menu, are not explained so you have to look through the key binding menu to see you need to press F1 (which is a strange choice; I rebinded it to tab). To exit menus you need to press spacebar, because pressing escape won't work. The actual menu interfaces are nice and easy to navigate though. Some powers have no explanation on how to even use them, not even in the key bindings. For example the Shadow Kill power, which tells "Summon a monstrous beast from the shadows to erase a target from the physical realm and recover one use of your equipped Shadow Technique." That sounds cool, but how do I use it? I was not very impressed with having to scour through the forums to find out how to use an ability which wasn't explained in game. Overall though, Aragami is easy to pick up and get into so it has a mostly good user experience.

Miscellaneous - There's customisation in the form of different skins to choose from. You can choose from 4 default skins, and also unlock 9 more.


Longevity/replayability - The average time to beat the game is only 6 hours ( howlongtobeat.com [howlongtobeat.com] ) but I've only completed 8 out of the 13 chapters and already have 6 hours clocked. Each mission has 3 medals to unlock (and it's impossible to get all 3 in one go) so if you want to 100% the game you'll certainly need to replay all the levels. The game is not very long but its length is fairly decent.

Modablity - This game comes with a level editor and workshop support, so once you've beaten the game there's still plenty to do. As of now there are 483 community made maps available to play.

Support - The developers are working really hard on improving their game. This is from the latest patch: "We are still hard at work to support and improve Aragami. This patch contains more than 100 minor bug fixes." They are also going to add more content in the future.

Is it worth the money? For $20, it really depends how much you like this type of game. I'd recommend to pick this up on sale of 30% off or more.

• Beautiful style, the music and graphics are really nice
  
• Unique shadow game mechanic
  
• Great functionality
  
• Intriguing story
  
• Fun and replayable, and community made levels add more content

• Fairly steep price
  
• Quite short
  
• Sometimes camera angles get a bit janky
  
• AI could be improved

Aragami is a really fun stealth game. If you enjoyed Dishonored you'd probably enjoy this too, with the similar blink mechanic and custom playstyle.
I give this game a 8/10

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