Shadows of the Damned is one of those PlayStation 3-era games that’s harder to play now since, while backwards compatible on Xbox, it isn’t on PC or PlayStation Plus Premium. However, it’ll get much easier to play soon, as Grasshopper Manufacture announced Shadows of the Damned Remastered.
Is Shadows of the Damned Remastered a remake?
The studio released a silly announcement video where protagonist Garcia “F***ing” Hotspur blasts at writer Suda 51 inside of the real world and shoots Grasshopper’s community manager James Mountain. It then goes to actual gameplay, showing that the remaster will still be in line with the 2011 original and not be a full remake.
It’s likely that there will at least be performance and resolution boosts, but more will be revealed at the Grasshopper Direct on June 14 at 9 p.m. PT.
Shadows of the Damned was developed by three notable Japanese figureheads: Shinji Mikami, Akira Yamaoka, and Suda 51, who are famous for Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and No More Heroes, respectively. While received somewhat well (its PS3 version has a 77 on Metacritic), it had a troubled development cycle that went through radical changes mostly at the behest of Electronic Arts. It started out as a psychological horror game in a bigger world where players didn’t have any firearms, but EA insisted that it have guns. Suda 51 later said that EA’s “demands were strong.”
Suda 51 and Mikami also did have influence on the game, but Massimo Guarini ended up directing much of the game under EA’s supervision. Shadows of the Damned also spent so long in early production, that it was trimmed in order to make up time. It was quite a slim game by 2011 standards and didn’t sell well, only moving 24,000 copies in its launch month in the United States.
Shadows of the Damned seemed dead, but it did make a surprise appearance in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes. This remaster shows that that wasn’t just a one-off cameo.
