Qliphah In Providence’s Shadow Review

I always like to see games try to do new things to freshen up a genre, so when I saw that Qliphah In Providence’s Shadow had been described as a tactical timeline RPG where counters are important to the fights, my interest was piqued. However, upon playing Qliphah it feels like a mix of a rhythm based fighting game and a tech demo that can’t carry a full game.

Qliphah in Providence’s Shadow is set in Tokyo where pockets of reality are collapsing and people are turning into monsters due to a drug epidemic. Yet even with all of this going on, some people are trying to live their day-to-day lives. One of those is Soma, part of the pair of protagonists, who becomes caught up in the events of the game during a basic delivery job. He is recruited by Rena, an agent who has similar powers to the monsters, but is working to stop them. The only reason Soma is recruited is because he wakes up with some powers of his own. Soma is essentially the audience’s voice, asking about what is going on and reacting how most people would in the same situation, while Rena is there to essentially lore dump. Neither character really breaks out with more depth than when you first meet them.

Qliphah’s story is pretty bonkers, crossing together cults, science, the issue of mass drug use, and the end of the world all in one. However, to get a lot of this information you will need to read every document that becomes unlocked on the evidence board. This detail is acquired through investigations, and this part of the game plays out like a visual novel. You get an overview of the city map and can visit points of interest where Rena and Soma will uncover some information that gives them a new lead, and invariably end up fighting the monsters, known as Tier Ones.

Some of this evidence contains skills you can unlock using research points, but there are a few that can only be unlocked by inputting keywords to unlock them. To be honest, I didn’t bother unlocking those, as the skills I had sufficed to get me through battles. The story wants to tie together the themes of how drugs can be destructive to society, how cults prey on the vulnerable, how science can give us answers but the cost may be too great, and a villain who wants to reset the world. Within those themes there is a good story to be told, but this game jumps around far too much and barely has time or depth to really pull that story together.

The main selling point of Qliphah is really its battle system. You can equip different skills to Rena and Soma, split between attacks, defence, and buffs. To be fair to the game, the way to access these skills during battles is simple enough, especially as you are controlling both characters at the same time. The D-pad and face buttons are used to pick moves, with a sub menu to access additional support moves, giving each character up to eight skills to equip.

You can unlock some of these moves through research points while on the evidence board, whereas others are unlocked through battles. As the characters level up they may also get enhanced versions of skills, but you can also upgrade skills using research points. You don’t get a lot of research points though, and they are better spent in unlocking a few skills and upgrading them instead of trying to fill out the inventory.

Each character has three attack moves, colour coded to red, yellow and blue, which is important to remember as enemies also attack with colour coded moves which you need to time and match in order to counter. Each attack has a different rhythm to it, so you don’t just match the colour but you need to time it so the counter is effective.

The issue with this system is that you want to also attack while the enemy is on cooldown, so you stack attacks, but those attacks need cooling down too. When the enemy starts attacking again, your stacks may not match what the enemy is doing, so you may still land attacks but you won’t get counters to break the enemy to allow you to do the special attacks. In a lot of fights then, it becomes a case of waiting for the enemy’s next move and matching it. The other issue is that if you don’t have a move stacked, everything just stops and you are then wasting moves to get around the screen, with movement itself not being as smooth as it could be.

One of the selling points is that if you counter correctly you will be putting together fights that are fast paced, but this falls apart when it comes into contact with reality. The only way for fights to be fast paced is to attack continuously, not bothering to actively try and counter. It also doesn’t help that the enemy designs are repetitive with not much variety.