Towaga: Among Shadows

My first hour with Towaga: Among Shadows genuinely surprised me, and that doesn't happen often with games that started life on a mobile storefront. The core hook is aggressively simple and a little bizarre: you play as Chimu, a Lightbearer warrior, and for the vast majority of the game you are physically rooted to a single spot on top of a ziggurat temple. No running, no dodging, no repositioning. Just a 360-degree light beam aimed with the right stick while shadow creatures pour in from every direction. It sounds like a bad pitch, and honestly I expected to bounce off it immediately. I didn't, at least not right away. The stationary combat works because the enemy design earns it. Flying grunts, teleporting casters, exploding bombers, slow heavy beasts - the threat variety forces you to triage targets rather than just spray the beam everywhere. Spells unlock as you progress through the story mode's roughly 42 phases: Wind Gust shoves nearby enemies back, Lava Slugs lobs a burning projectile that deals damage over time, and a petrification shockwave that turns everything near you to stone doubles as a get-out-of-jail card when the screen floods. You can only equip one spell at a time, which is an odd restriction that limits tactical depth more than it should. Shards earned in combat feed into an upgrade tree covering health, beam width, mana recovery, and spell potency, plus cosmetic outfits that carry passive bonuses. The loop of clear a temple, bank your shards, upgrade, repeat is satisfying in short sessions. Breaking up the stationary phases are flying sections where Chimu takes to the sky and you get full twin-stick movement - left stick to fly, right stick to aim, with a dash available. These should feel like a release valve, but the feedback from most reviewers matches my impression: they're notably less interesting than the ground phases, partly because spells are disabled while airborne and partly because the small arena means you're always just a few bad seconds from getting cornered. Boss fights appear at the end of temple runs and require reading attack patterns, which adds a bit more strategy, but they don't dramatically change the formula. Beyond story mode there's a challenge mode (reduced stats, one long gauntlet), two survival modes for high-score chasing, and a local multiplayer brawler mode for up to four players in a flying arena - all of which feel considerably thinner than the campaign. The honest caveat is that this game was built for mobile touchscreens first, and the seams show. The upgrade grind becomes punishing once the easy early-clear bonuses dry up, and the story - such as it is - is buried in lore artifacts that most players will skip entirely. It also bears mentioning that the game was delisted from Steam in early 2025, so if you're seeing it on a key reseller, that's the only route left to a PC copy. What keeps Towaga from being a dismissal is the art. The animation quality is genuinely exceptional for an indie of this size, with hand-drawn enemies and lighting effects on your beam hits that make combat feel punchy even when the systems underneath are coasting. Think Samurai Jack crossed with a Mesoamerican folk aesthetic - it's distinctive, and it carries the experience further than the mechanics alone would. For players who want a focused, visually rich arcade holdout game that respects a session limit of an hour or two, Towaga delivers. For anyone wanting mechanical depth, build variety, or a story worth investing in, it runs dry well before the credits.

Alex · Scout Team

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