Shadow of the Beast First Gameplay of the PS4 Exclusive Looks Pretty Faithful to the Original – Fans Will Love it

Heavy Spectrum have shared the first gameplay of the Pre-Alpha version of Shadow of the Beast the PS4 exclusive remake of the 1989 Commodore Amiga original. Shadow of the Beast appears to retain the aspects that made the original game such a standout game, and fans should be pleased.

Players can explore the alien world of Karamoon and discover hidden secrets, while battling  hordes of enemies unlocking brutal moves in the quest to overthrow Maletoth. Souls of other players can be discovered and summoned to fight at your side. Survival mode puts players to the test against increasingly cunning enemies in endless, brutal combat.

I’ts been awhile since our last update on Shadow Of The Beast. Our long silence has been because we’ve been working hard to turn the concept we showed last time into a reality. And, whilst we haven’t quite finished that journey yet, we wanted to take this chance to share with you some early shots from the game.

We talked a little in our previous blog entry about the impact that the original games had on us as kids. When our team started putting together the concepts for our take on Shadow of the Beast, one thing we kept coming back to was how important it was to us that we made sure that our game stirred up that same level of emotion, especially through the visually striking, alien landscapes of Karamoon.

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The screenshots you see here are taken from the harsh, arid wasteland that is Karamoon’s desert. The balance between beauty and brutality has been a running theme for us whilst we’ve been building the game. Our main character, Aarbron, was forged by the evil Maletoth as a living weapon – and his journey through this beautiful, vibrant world is a savage one. We have tried to find ways to bring both sides of this juxtaposition to life to create a unique and intriguing setting for the gameplay to live within.

Along side creating a range of sweeping vistas and strange creatures, we have also been busy refining the game’s core combat and platforming to try and find just the right blend to make a compelling experience for players.

It’s been a long road to get here (especially if you are counting back to our original inspiration!) and we thank you for both bearing with us and taking the time to read about our progress. We hope to have more news to share with you before too long.

Matt Birch, founder of studio Heavy Spectrum, developers of the Shadow of the Beast PS4 Exclusive, explains:

“It was one of my first experiences of 16-bit games, I played it and was completely amazed by the graphics, the music. I remember walking away and carrying on thinking about it. It really hit me at the time – it was probably the first game I thought about after I’d walked away, like you would with a book or a movie. It was a real moment of thinking games could do something incredible, and are going somewhere incredible. It’s something that’s stuck with me ever since, and that’s one of the things that makes Shadow of the Beast so special to me.”

“I had some conversations with Sony about different games we could make, and they said if you could just choose anything, what would it be? XDev is basically where Psygnosis used to be, so I said I’d like to talk about this game you had in your old IP. I talked about how it meant a lot to me as a kid, and I’d like to give that same inspirational experience to another generation of players.

“The Sony guys thought it was interesting and asked me to develop the pitch. That’s what I started to do. I worked with a bunch of veterans, and they all had their own experiences, so we plugged that in. I talked about how I wanted to make the game something different, and different to other games that are out there right now. They all really liked what we were talking about, and PlayStation 4 was just coming around at the time.”

“With the combat loop, we tried to do something a bit different,” says Birch. “I wanted to create that sense of getting through hundreds of baddies, which is what you got from those older games, but it has to be done in a new way. There’s no point just redoing a game from 25 years ago. It’s already been done and that ground’s been well trodden.”

Shadow of the Beast appears to be a worthy tribute to the original and fans will not be disappointed. There is no release date for the game yet but an announcement should coming pretty soon. We will bring you any news as soon as it becomes available.