Shadows of Kepler Preview for Steam

Shadows of Kepler bills itself as a survival-horror RPG with the promise of impactful, branching decision making, and a vast world. What I saw in the demo (the game is expected to be out February 2021) is a rough, but potentially promising glimpse of an ambitious work in progress. There’s no major studio behind Shadows of Kepler, and the dev team, Infinite Hole, consists of just four artists working on the game in their spare time, according to the game website. 

Playing Shadows of Kepler is an interesting experience. You take control of Sergeant Cooper, our traditionally stoic brown haired Caucasian in space (putting aside that both times I played the intro sequence, the character’s face glitched out of existence, leaving me listening to a talking spike of hair) as he navigates the titular Kepler space station. In the tune of Dead Space, Alien, any game that bills itself as a horror-shooter in space, something! Has gone wrong! Aboard the ship. That something, as it turns out, is… generic sci-fi goop. And horribly deformed monsters that might have once been people. And – you know what I mean. You’re aware of the sci-fi genre horror shooter and what it entails; narrow corridors. Ugly monsters. Slime and biogoo everywhere. 

Shadows of Kepler is in its demo phase, and it shows. The game certainly looks good, in terms of texture quality, and the interior of the ship is, well, nice, if generic – but the gameplay itself is massively clunky. Lag stutters are common and physical movement feels awkward; you interact with most objects by pressing E and triggering an unskippable little animation (no manually crouching under objects, opening doors, or using ladders for you!). While games like Alien: Isolation use this to emphasize how slow and vulnerable your character is, here it just felt a little frustrating. It became a bit of a problem during the first “aaaah, a monster, runaway” sequence. A (admittedly well-designed and grotesque) tentacle monster mouth beast popped out of a doorway and tried to swallow me. A little preset animation plays out where your character stabs the offending tendril with a screwdriver before you’re returned control over the character and allowed to run away – but you have to crawl under a pile of debris to get away, and the animation is so slow that the monster ate me twice as soon as I’d crawled out. Only by mercilessly spamming the sprint key was I able to get away. 

This isn’t to say that the game isn’t fun. It’s definitely pretty and interesting to look at, and the particle effects of the laser/fire shotgun – which, helpfully, can switch between laser mode and fire mode – is pretty awesome. Struck enemies don’t so much fall over as explode into a shockwave of lights and bodyparts that squelch satisfyingly as they fly around the room. What’s slightly less awesome is that if an enemy so much as touches you, you’re dead – there’s no health bar, and you’re subjected to a kill-animation POV death. So, enjoy being locked into place and dying because a goon clipped into you. Also, as fun as the shotgun is, it doesn’t appear to be very accurate – I swear that I’ve fired it at an enemy at almost point blank range and watched in frustrated horror as the projectile causes an explosion to bloom against a wall instead of, you know, the necromorph-esque monster trying to peel open my face. 

There is a good game here in Shadows of Kepler, it’s just buried under bugs and clunky gameplay. It needs polish – and a little more world-building so it doesn’t feel so painfully generic (without any kind of explanation for what’s happening, this could be a fan-made Dead Space game without as many jump scares). Once the dev team starts implementing more of those RPG and survival elements, I think they’ll have something very engaging and exciting to play, so this is definitely something I plan on keeping my eyes on. It should also be emphasized that, for all I’ve said, this game is still being made by a tiny team in their free time, and considering that, the results so far are pretty damn decent. 

Check Out the Shadows of Kepler Trailer:

You can add Shadows of Kepler to your wishlist via Steam.