Quality time with ghosts and goblins Shadowveil is a stylish, tough single-player auto-battler The first Legends of the Five Rings PC game will make you work for your wins. Kevin Purdy Mar 5, 2025 7:00 am | 1 Credit: Palindrome Interactive Credit: Palindrome Interactive Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOne thingShadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings does well is invoke terror. Not just the terror of an overwhelming mass of dark energy encroaching on your fortress, which is what the story suggests. Moreso, the terror of hoping your little computer-controlled fighters will do the smart thing, then being forced to watch, helpless, as they are consumed by algorithmic choices, bad luck, your strategies, or some combination of all three.Shadowveil, the first video game based on the more than 30-year-old Legend of the Five Rings fantasy franchise, is a roguelite auto-battler. You pick your Crab Clan hero (berserker hammer-wielder or tactical support type), train up some soldiers, and assign all of them abilities, items, and buffs you earn as you go. When battle starts, you choose which hex to start your fighters on, double-check your load-outs, then click to start and watch what happens. You win and march on, or you lose and regroup at base camp, buying some upgrades with your last run's goods.Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings launch trailer. In my impressions after roughly seven hours of playing, Shadowveil could do more to soften its learning curve, but it presents a mostly satisfying mix of overwhelming odds and achievement. What's irksome now could get patched, and what's already there is intriguing, especially for the price.DetailsDeveloper: Palindrome InteractivePlatform: PC (Steam)Release Date: March 4, 2025Price: $25 (discounted at launch)Minimum specs: Intel Core i5 2500 or equiv.; 16GB RAM; GeForce GTX 1070 or equiv (6GB VRAM)Links: Steam | Official websiteThe hard-worn path to knowledge There are almost always more enemies than you have fighters, so it's your job to find efficiencies, choke points, and good soldier pairings. Credit: Palindrome Interactive There are almost always more enemies than you have fighters, so it's your job to find efficiencies, choke points, and good soldier pairings. Credit: Palindrome Interactive Some necessary disclosure: Auto-battlers are not one of my go-to genres. Having responsibility for all the prep, but no control over what fighters will actually do when facing a glut of enemies, can feel punishing, unfair, and only sometimes motivating to try something different. Add that chaos and uncertainty to procedurally generated paths (like in Slay the Spire), and sometimes the defeats felt like my fault, sometimes the random number generator's doing.Losing is certainly anticipated inShadowveil. The roguelite elements are the items and currencies you pick up from victories and carry back after defeat. With these, you can unlock new kinds of fighters, upgrade your squad members, and otherwise grease the skids for future runs. You'll have to make tough choices here, as there are more than a half-dozen resources, some unique to each upgrade type, and some you might not pick up at all in any given run. Back at your camp/hub, you can upgrade characters with traits, masteries, stats, item slots, or whole new classes and jobs. Credit: Palindrome Interactive Back at your camp/hub, you can upgrade characters with traits, masteries, stats, item slots, or whole new classes and jobs. Credit: Palindrome Interactive There is no difficulty setting, and while the tutorial-style, pre-credits run gives you the basics of choosing abilities and placing troops, you are going to learn a lot through trial and error. Each fighter has a dozen stats to consider, and the game leans into abbreviations and tiny icons for each. The game has a codex, which helps (though I'm still uncertain on how a fighter gets "Marked"). I did not really get what "Elemental Power" was until a half-dozen runs had failed (it powers not only magic attacks, but healing amountspretty important).Watching your team get mauled a few times will teach you the rest. You might, for example, set up your melee fighters near the enemy's ranged attackers, assuming they'll take them out and then pivot to the boss in the middle of the stage. But then that peripheral shooter will get lucky, evade three hits in a row, and suddenly the boss, perhaps sensing a soft target, is at that fighter's back. Your other two fighters refuse to pivot, sticking to their own corners while an unlucky one is flanked and murdered, and, yep, it's time to abandon this run.Next time, you would focus your upgrades on defense for the little guy, movement speed for your hero, and position them all very differently. Will that work? Maybe, but you won't fight the same fight again. The invisible dice rolls on each hit, the changing order of battles and rewards, the seemingly algorithmic but often chaotic choices by your fightersit's certainly a more accurate a portrayal of battle than turn-based, perfect-knowledge strategy, but definitely not more confidence-boosting.That elusive balance of challenge and reward Some abilities only work for certain classes, others are generic, and some can be combined into upgraded versions. Each time you run, the ability cards are different. Credit: Palindrome Interactive Some abilities only work for certain classes, others are generic, and some can be combined into upgraded versions. Each time you run, the ability cards are different. Credit: Palindrome Interactive Is it fun? Does the challenge bring you back? I've had fun more often than not, and I've enjoyed my introduction to the Five Rings world, despite some exposition-dumping dialogue. I failed the first chapter many, many times, and started getting sick of the goblins and wraiths that inhabit it, but more enemy types have shown up in Act 2. Each run has made me feel a smidge wiser, gradually better prepared, and occasionally clever, but one dumb move can doom an otherwise winnable run. It's not a straight line, which can make the wins feel great, but the losses a bit random.The card art, character portraits, and cutscenes have the look of a collectible card game brought to the screen, which is appropriate for this very collectible-deck-driven franchise. The animations during battle are not entirely fluid, but slightly violent and jerky; this seems like an aesthetic choice to bring out the chaos and violence, not a tech limitation. There's a dark look to everything, and lots of calligraphic hand-brushed symbols and writing, including in some interface elements I wish were a bit easier to parse and navigate. I have no real critiques about the sounds, and especially the music, which is engaging and sometimes perfectly forboding. There's a painterly look to a lot of the game's visuals, giving you interesting things to look at while you wonder why your tactician chose to go the long way around. Credit: Palindrome Interactive There's a painterly look to a lot of the game's visuals, giving you interesting things to look at while you wonder why your tactician chose to go the long way around. Credit: Palindrome Interactive The good news is that pretty much everything that irks me about Shadowveilinitial difficulty, resource scarcity, some UI hassle and unexplained systemscould be tweaked in code updates. A day-one patch may or may not have tweaked the difficulty already; I've had much better success after the full release than in pre-release beta. Auto-battling and position strategy are still not my strongest suits, but that might change if I keep at it.Shadowveil is not a casual game, but it is one you can play in sessions. It has a lot of built-in replayability, and it's set in an interesting world to dive into. There is no official Steam Deck or controller support at launch, but you can probably get by with the Deck's trackpads in a pinch. And I would guess that, given the game's very modest hardware needs, Deck certification and maybe even a non-trackpad gamepad scheme could be on the way.Shadowveil will almost certainly benefit from strategy guides and community wikis. If you're intrigued by the setting, the look, or the prospect that you're way better at this type of game than this reviewer, by all means: journey into the dark mists.Kevin PurdySenior Technology ReporterKevin PurdySenior Technology Reporter Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch. 1 Comments