From Out Of The Shadows

From Out Of The Shadows — A Practical Guide

From Out Of The Shadows is a 2D action-platformer that came out on Steam and a few other storefronts a while back. It's got the usual metroidvania DNA — locked abilities, backtracking, environmental puzzles — but it's small enough that you'll finish it in roughly 4 to 6 hours depending on how often you die. The game is built around a dual-state combat system. Your character can shift between two forms at any time, and each form has completely different movesets. One is fast and good at clearing groups of enemies. The other is slower but hits harder and can break through certain barriers. The idea is solid on paper. In practice it takes about 30 minutes before it clicks, and then the rest of the game just flows because the system is actually decent.

Where to Get From Out Of The Shadows

You can download it from Steam directly. It's also on GOG if you prefer DRM-free. The Humble Store sometimes has bundle deals on it. At launch it was priced around $10 to $15, so unless it's on a major sale right now that's roughly what you'd pay. No subscription or account tie-up required beyond the store you choose. If you're on Mac or Linux it runs natively, which isn't something I always mention unless someone asks but I've had it run fine on my M1 machine without any Rosetta stuff. Windows is obviously the primary target though and that's where most bugs surface if there are any.

Getting Past the Early Frustration

The first hour is rough. The controls have a slight input delay on the form-shift button — not a huge delay, maybe 80 to 100 milliseconds if I had to guess — and it catches you off guard when you're in the middle of a fight. I spent about 20 minutes fighting the same four enemies in the second area because I kept mistiming the shift and my character would freeze mid-animation while the enemies landed free hits. The fix is to hold the shift button for a split second before tapping your attack instead of tapping both at once. It feels awkward at first because you're used to being snappy in platformers, but it reduces the deaths in the early boss encounters by a lot. I stopped dying to the first major enemy after I made that adjustment and moved on. People who quit before that point are usually just fighting the input lag and not realizing it's there.

Combat Nuances Beginners Miss

There's a mechanic the game never explains clearly: form-shifting while holding a directional input will cancel your current attack animation and immediately start a new one in that direction. This is useful for edge-cases like when an enemy teleports behind you mid-attack, or when you miss a platform jump and need to recover mid-air. The game's tutorial covers the basics but doesn't mention the directional cancel, so most players just learn it through trial and error over maybe 3 to 4 hours of playtime. Another thing: your second form has a parry window that's about 0.3 seconds wide. That's tight. Tighter than it needs to be for most players. I found it easier to just dodge-roll through the attacks that would otherwise require a parry rather than spamming the block button. Your stamina drains faster when you parry anyway, so dodging is actually more sustainable in longer fights even though it looks like the slower option on paper.

Traversal and Level Design

The movement is the strongest part of the game. You get a double jump pretty early and a wall-slide shortly after. The wall-slide lets you cross gaps that look impossible until you realize you can slide down the far side and grab a ledge at the bottom. There's one puzzle in the third area — the Sunken Archive — where you need to use the wall-slide in combination with a timed door to get through, and it's genuinely well-designed. It doesn't feel like a chore. The level design has two weaknesses. First, some areas repeat the same enemy combinations three or four times in a row, which makes traversal feel sloggy rather than tense. Second, the visibility during boss fights can be an issue on larger arenas because the lighting is stylized and dark by default. I actually turned down the ambient light brightness in the options menu so the enemy silhouettes stood out more against the background. It's a simple setting change but it matters more than it should.

Puzzles and Ability Gating

The ability gates are straightforward. You beat a boss, you get a new movement or combat tool, you go back to old areas. Standard metroidvania structure. The puzzles themselves range from easy to annoying. The easy ones use your new ability in a single clear way. The annoying ones hide the solution behind a visual cue that's easy to miss — like a cracked wall that looks exactly like the other cracked walls in the level. I got stuck for about 45 minutes on a puzzle in the second act because I couldn't see that a particular platform was destructible. The hit detection on those breakable surfaces is inconsistent across the whole game. Some break on the first hit, some take two, and a few don't register hits at all unless you're using the heavy form. If you're banging away at a wall and it's not breaking, switch to the heavy form and try again. That workaround solved the problem for every locked door I encountered.

Performance and Bugs

The game runs fine on my setup — Ryzen 5, 16 GB RAM, integrated graphics on the lower end — but I did hit a soft-lock once. It happened in the final dungeon when a scripted event didn't trigger after a cutscene, leaving me trapped in a room with no way forward and no enemies to kill to force the event. I had to reload a save from about 20 minutes earlier. This seems to be a known issue based on forum posts and patch notes from the developer. There was a hotfix released but it doesn't cover every edge-case. If you're playing through and something stops progressing, reloading your last save is the only real option. Frame rate drops show up occasionally in the later areas with lots of particles on screen. I'm talking maybe a 5 to 10 percent dip from the baseline 60 FPS, not anything that makes the game unplayable but enough to notice during dense boss fights.

What It Does Well and Where It Falls Short

From Out Of The Shadows does two things really well: the dual-form combat system and the movement flow. Once the combat clicks, the game feels fast and responsive. The art direction is consistent and the soundtrack is serviceable, not memorable but not distracting either. The weaknesses are the same ones that plague most indie metroidvanias at this budget level. Limited content after the ability gates start feeling repetitive, a handful of unresolved bugs, and some puzzles that rely on visual clarity the game doesn't always provide. It's not a bad game. It's just not a complete one. If you're looking for something deeper in the genre, Hollow Knight or Metroid Dread are the obvious alternatives. But if you want a shorter, tighter experience that respects your time and gets most of the fundamentals right, this is worth your money at full price and absolutely worth it on sale.