Cult of Shadows

The secrets of Bel Noa

Cult of Shadows sends players into the dark, procedurally generated dungeons beneath Bel Noa, hunting down cultists and the Mythos they summon in pursuit of the town's buried secrets. It's a hack-and-slash action roguelite built by the small studio Squirrel Tail Games, structured around three hand-built levels layered with procedurally generated dungeons and four playable characters, each carrying their own distinct skill set rather than drawing from a shared pool. The premise is thin — dark cult, dark gods, darker dungeons — but it's really just scaffolding for a familiar loop: fight, die, return stronger, and try again. At launch the game ships with three hand-built levels and three procedurally generated dungeons layered on top, priced at NZ$21.99, a fairly modest footprint for the genre that puts real weight on how well its core combat and crafting loop can be replayed. Reviewers largely judge the game on how well that loop executes rather than on any particular narrative ambition, and the verdicts split fairly evenly between genuine enthusiasm and pointed frustration.

A Halls of Torment comparison, for better and worse

The comparison reviewers reach for most often is Halls of Torment, both in overall gameplay feel and in its large, sprawling maps — one reviewer specifically calls out the game's second map as unusually expansive even by the genre's standards. Combat revolves around fighting large numbers of enemies simultaneously while learning enemy attack patterns and gradually building out a character's stats and skills between runs. For players who click with it, the appeal is straightforward: one reviewer describes the gameplay as "incredibly addictive" and says the highest graphics settings in particular make the experience feel polished for a small studio's output. Others are considerably less convinced by the same combat loop in its early hours, with one reviewer describing it as clunky and limited — "wade into enemies flailing about" is how they put it, with only a single warrior-type character available to them at that point in the game.

Building a weapon out of what you dismantle

Where Cult of Shadows earns some of its warmest praise is its weapon-crafting system. Rather than simply finding better gear, players are encouraged to collect and dismantle common, magical, blessed, and cursed items to construct progressively stronger equipment — a loop more than one reviewer specifically calls out as satisfying once it clicks, even while acknowledging the opening stretch can feel grindy before a strong enough weapon comes together. One reviewer frames the difficulty itself as a feature rather than a flaw, noting they appreciated that the game wasn't tuned to be beatable in an hour the way some pressured indie releases are, and found real satisfaction in eventually clearing a level after repeated failed attempts. That said, not every reviewer's progression experience was so rewarding — one detailed review reports over two hours of play with essentially no stat or equipment improvement to show for it, having never encountered jewelry or armor pieces beyond a single shield, undercutting the exact sense of growing power the genre is built around.

Where the seams still show

The most consistent structural complaint concerns ranged weapons. Reviewers report acquiring staves and bows early on, only to discover they can't actually be equipped without an accompanying trinket or armor piece that, at least in the game's current state, doesn't appear to be obtainable yet — effectively locking out entire weapon categories rather than merely gating them behind grinding. Stability is the other recurring issue: one reviewer who logged over 1,600 minutes says the game's flashier abilities can cause stuttering, and a separate, more terse review reports the game failing to launch at all on a Steam Machine paired with a Steam Controller. Set against those complaints, several shorter reviews describe the underlying loop as fundamentally sound but rough — "field for improvement," as one puts it — rather than broken outright. Others are terser still: one enthusiastic one-line review simply reads "let him cook," a vote of confidence in the small team's trajectory that echoes the more detailed praise elsewhere in the review set, even if it offers little in the way of specifics.

A small team visibly still working

What comes through even in mixed reviews is a sense that Squirrel Tail Games is actively iterating rather than walking away. One reviewer who compares their demo experience directly to the current build says balance has improved noticeably, most bugs from that earlier version are gone, and progression pacing feels smoother, while flagging that some skill-power imbalances remain. Multiple reviewers frame their criticism through that lens explicitly — impressed by what a small team has built, while still hoping for continued patches to fix the ranged-weapon gating and stability issues. Regular post-launch updates are cited by more than one reviewer as a reason for cautious optimism about where the game is headed.

Verdict

Cult of Shadows is a rough-edged but sincere entry in the crowded hack-and-slash roguelite space, elevated by a genuinely satisfying weapon-crafting loop and four characters with real mechanical identity, and held back by a progression system that can feel like it's stalling out entirely in its opening hours. The Halls of Torment comparisons are earned in its better moments, but locked-out ranged weapons, occasional stutter under heavier ability use, and at least one confirmed launch failure on specific hardware keep it from being an easy recommendation as it currently stands. For genre fans willing to tolerate some grind and rough edges from a visibly small, actively improving team, there's a real game worth checking in on here — just maybe not at full price on day one.