Shadows Behind The Throne Demo

It used to be that most people did not even dream of being in control of anything but their lives, or not even those, depending on the type of regime they were under. Thankfully, things changed over the centuries, and technology now allows everyone to take the reigns of simulated empires and test their leadership skills in a virtual environment. In fact, grand strategy games can now be complex enough to rival the real thing, more or less.

Shadows Behind The Throne is not your average 4x/grand strategy game, especially not when it comes to what you actually have to do or what the ultimate goal is. In short, your purpose is to influence nation leaders and use dark rituals in order to bring the apocalypse as quickly as possible and destroy the human race as a whole. Financial and social issues are irrelevant most of the time, so it’s a welcome change in the genre.   Instead of being a king or a hero of sorts, you play the role of a dark entity bent on destruction, yet your influence on the physical world is minimal. Hence, you must use clever tricks and various rituals in order to gain followers and servants, which makes the whole thing feel very exciting. On top of it all, it’s even possible to grow powerful enough to send devastating storms over the world, as well as start an ice age to decimate the population.

As you might have guessed, having an actual army is impossible for obvious reasons, but only at first. Given your dark talents, it’s entirely possible to use fallen soldiers as your undead warriors, but the hard part is having those people killed in the first place. A civil war usually has many casualties, so it’s in your best interest to incite violence with every chance you get, since more death actually fuels your efforts.   The interface can be a tad annoying at first, although it is designed to be approachable by anyone. You can move around the map, zoom in and out, as well as switch between two different views with the press of a button. The game lacks tooltips and a more intuitive element organization, on the other hand, even if you can check up on the PDF containing the tutorial. Hence, more work is definitely required in this regard.

Shadows Behind The Throne has one major upside: its original approach to the 4x genre. Thus, there are no other games like this one out there, so it’s understandable that it has a few problems and gameplay issues at this point. However, you can help the developer iron out these imperfections by participating in the game’s Kickstarter campaign.