This is a sponsored post courtesy of Positech Games.
Today sees the release of Shadowhand, a game where you don the mask and bandana of a highwayman and fight your way across England’s darkened roads, earning your keep by holding people up with your… deck of cards. Yeah, in Shadowhand you fight duels by playing solitaire.
Shadowhand is on sale now on Steam.
You can see how it all works below, as we play Shadowhand for an hour:
It shouldn’t be that great a surprise, considering developer Grey Alien Games are the makers of 2015’s genuinely excellent Regency Solitaire. In that game your delinquent brother had squandered the family fortune, and you had to get it back the only way you knew how: touring Britain’s pleasure towns and making money on games of cards.
Shadowhand builds upon a lot of the same groundwork as Regency Solitaire. The concept itself remains: you start with a board before you covered with cards and you want to clear them all from the table. You can only clear a card if it is one higher or lower than the card currently in your hand. Whenever you clear a card, that becomes the one in your hand, so you’re looking to build runs of cards, scanning the board for ways to clear a lot of cards in a single turn.
Surrounding that core game are shops and inventories that play into the duelling meta.
The duels have you face off against an AI, both of you trying to clear cards from the table. Each time you clear a card it adds to the charge of your weapon, and once charged you can use it to damage your enemy. The items and skills you amass as you play open a layer of strategy because each time you go into a duel you’ll need to weigh up taking in a high-power but slow to charge weapon blunderbuss or slight little knife that does less damage but which you can use more often.
If it all sounds like your kind of thing you can buy Shadowhand in theSteam store.