We're Almost Dead to the World

Long time fans of this website will be aware that I have something of a strong affection for 7/10 PS2 era 3D platformers. I used to play every one I could get my hands on--if it was available on the Playstation Vita, I at least touched it. That was years ago--since then, I've upgraded to a Steam Deck with emulators, and have thus been tracking down all the 7/10 platformers I didn't have access to at the time (stuff like Nintendo only games, games from the era that were neither popular enough to remaster years later nor simple enough for developers to get running on the PSP). This has resulted in my having played a lot of junk this year, stuff like Legend of Spyro, a "3D platformer" where you walk down corridors and get into frequent button mashing contests with generic goons that require *just enough* attentiveness to disallow me from turning my brain off and enjoying myself. Buuuut not everything I played was bad, there's some stuff that really blew my hat off, which brings us to today's subject.

I would've played Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) when it came out 20 something years ago, but I don't remember being very charitable towards it. I had recently discovered the online Sonic the Hedgehog community, which, at the time, at least in my neck of the woods, was very preferential to the 2D Genesis games and hyperbolically negative towards the 3D games (particularly Heroes, for some reason). I'm very easily influenced by other peoples' opinions, and thus I was, for YEARS, a hardcore 3D Sonic hater. 2D Sonic games good 3D ones bad! So I wasn't a big fan of Shadow 2005 when I played it, and my opinion was not served well by the fact that I was playing the rough hewned PS2 port, which has some major framerate issues and doesn't run very well. Characters in these games move fast, you need those extra frames! (My sibling and I went for the PS2 version specifically cause that was the only version of the game in the US that included the Japanese dub, which we both liked better than the 4Kids voices. The Japanese dub of Sonic Adventure 1 is *exactly* as iconic as the English version, in my opinion)

So for years, based on that bad and badly influenced first experience, I assumed I hated Shadow the Hedgehog 2005--it was too edgy, not as cool as it thought it was, and what was the deal with the guns? Shadow has superpowers, why does he need a gun? And the years went by, and I kind of forgot about the game, and the Sonic franchise went in its own directions and life moved on.

Anyway, cut to November 2024--I'd bought a new desktop PC that could actually run PS2 emulation decently. I downloaded a LEGALLY AQUIRED COPY of the Sly Cooper 3 ISO (This is Neocities, I probably don't actually need to pretend I didn't pirate it), had a predictably good time, and then I decided I should go through some of the 3D platformers for the system I hadn't been able to play on Vita. And that brought me back to Shadow.

Now, I'm a cruel soul, I love schadenfreude, and I was initially figuring that playing Shadow in 2025 would be good for an ironic laugh. I poured myself a cup of Arizona Arnold Palmer Diet tea and took a sip, and suddenly, I got an inclination: I would roleplay as a shithead 12 year old who loved Sonic Adventure 2 who thought Shadow with a gun was the sickest shit ever, and I'd assess the game on those grounds. As a laugh! As a joke, you know. Anyway, I booted up the game, watched the iconic introductory cutscene. I laughed at the frequent cheap hits the first level throws at you, I picked the neutral route for that stage, and then I moved onto stage 2.

What happened next was that I ended up completely loving the game. It is now one of my all time favorite 3D platformers, right up there with Jak and Daxter II and Sly Cooper 3 (and Sonic Adventure).

I'll get into the particular level that won me over in a second, but to clarify real quick: I think that act of roleplay really allowed me to let my guard down with this game. When I wasn't actively sabotaging the experience, I found myself better appreciating the game's weird, mazelike structure, its open ended level design, its willingness to go to darker places than Sega usually lets this series go. By just giving the game a chance, I opened the doors to me having a genuine experience that I won't get anywhere else. And that's beautiful.

Quick overview if you're not familiar: Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) is an entry in the longrunning Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. It's an immediate sequel to the imo much worse Sonic Heroes (2003), and is specifically intended to answer a lot of the questions raised by (and generally relies on familiarity with) 2001's Sonic Adventure 2. It stars Sonic's dark and brooding rival, Shadow the Hedgehog, as he navigates a war waged between evil aliens led by the mysterious and sinister (and not very interesting) Black Doom of the Black Arms, Doctor Eggman and his army of robots, and the GUN troops and commander (who had been incidental villains in Sonic Adventure 2) who in this game are allied with the more traditionally "heroic" Sonic characters, like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, etc. Technically, most of the levels have Shadow attempting to complete one out of two or three missions, a dark mission, a hero mission, or a neutral mission that usually involves just reaching the end of the level. Depending on which missions the player chooses to complete, Shadow will move through different routes through the game, with a widely branching storyline that can end in ten different ways, as well as a "last story" that is unlocked after seeing all the endings, and consists of a canonical finale. Shadow can run fast, walk up walls at high speeds and go through loop de loops, operate vehicles and weapons, and is usually accompanied by some member of one of the three warring factions urging him to complete whatever mission will help them personally out the most. The game was received negatively in 2005, and was widely mocked by critics and eventually clickbait youtubers.

The first level that REALLY blew my socks off was Mad Matrix. It's apparently not that well liked a level by fans, but I *loved* its weird open world structure. It basically consists of a maze of pathways you go through on rails, with 4 points of interest you have to navigate to to clear the Hero mission. The dark mission, meanwhile, is played ENTIRELY on the center maze, with the goal of locating and detonating (which you do through touch) various bombs littered throughout the pathways. I did the hero mission on my first playthrough, however, intrigued, I exited out of the story mode and played the dark mission via the level select screen. I REALLY LIKE THE DARK MISSION, OKAY. I thought it was relaxing, and cool, and I've played that mission about a dozen times since I rediscovered the game. It's just a vibe, you know? I liked it so much, I drew THIS comics page sort of recreating the experience, basically as a sort of maze game with a vague computer theme (you're directing a robot to respond to a question, instead of hacking a section of the internet). It's a good level, okay?

After getting a Steam Deck, I installed a Gamecube emulator on it and played through Shadow portably too, and, eventually, got all the endings (including the true ending, which we'll get to). I have some thoughts on the various routes, but to shorten the story somewhat, I ended up being a big fan of Shadow's choose your own adventure structure. It's got an amazingly ambitious choice tree for a game like this, severely so--I don't think I even know of any Twine games that are THIS open ended, and Twine games don't have gameplay to worry about! I also think it's a much better "Your Choices Matter" 3D platformer than Epic Mickey, which seems so quaint and restricted by comparison. Mickey Mouse has to make vaguely similar moral choices, sure, but he still goes through basically the same game every time--SHADOW, meanwhile, has a completely different experience depending on who he sides with. With that in mind, let's get into some individual routes. Let's start with:

The Pure Dark Route

The pure dark route is probably my favorite route through the game. I've only ever completed this version of the story by beelining to Central City as soon as the game really opens up, and sticking with the dark missions until the final level. Central City frustrated me on my first playthrough due to its time limit, nonlinear level design, and confusing scavenger hunt structure, but the experience stuck with me--on my second playthrough, I had a much better time and it's now another one of my favorite levels. Aesthetically, though, it's got nothing on what's to come--

Unlike any of the other routes, the pure dark route of Shadow 2005 climaxes in the second to last level, The Ark. In terms of gameplay, it's nothing special, just a series of Star Fox-esque on rails flying sections where you have to take down some (not very well flagposted) drones. AESTHETICALLY, though? Oh my god. The music is wild, it's technically a remix of the last level from Sonic Adventure 2, but way funkier--halfway through the song, human vocals begin getting incorporated, and it's a really distinct track for a level that, narratively, represents Shadow's fall from grace...

If you do the dark mission in this level, well...

The boss following the Ark is my favorite boss in the game--a GUN mech you initially fight by repeated homing attacks, until it drops its weapon, at which point you can easily take it down by shooting missiles at it. And that MUSIC--it's a remix of the first boss fight from Sonic Adventure 2, in a techno style, but with a notably grimmer air than the original--it feels more desperate, more judgemental.

This boss fight is, in fact, humanity's last stand. When Shadow wins, the boss loses altitude and crashes through the atmosphere towards Earth, pilot in tow. The next cutscene shows Black Arms firing the Eclipse Canon at the White House, destroying a whole city, and, effectively, guaranteeing humanity's death.

The final level of this route is cleanup--Shadow rampages through GUN Fortress, with some of the bosses from Sonic Adventure 2 making cameo appearances as regular enemies, and can choose to fight either Sonic or Black Doom at the end, but Earth is fucked regardless of his decision. He's already gone past the point of no return if you get to this level, and the music is a slow, mournful dirge. It's a tragedy.

Isn't that kind of a weird story to tell in a Sonic game? Isn't this series for children? How did Sega let the developers get away with this? Well, there's a reason.

One of the reason I like cartoony 3D platformers of this vintage so much is that the genre really struggled to compete in the 2000s--the release of games like Grand Theft Auto III, Halo, and Deus Ex had a lot of kids pretending they were more mature than they looked, and colorful cartoon mascots were not "in" at the time. So the ones that stuck around had to match the generation's toughness, and you got stuff like Jak and Daxter hangin out in a Grand Theft Auto style city in between levels, where they were free to steal cars and open fire on innocent civilians with little consequence. This, occassionally, resulted in works of distinguished beauty, for which there's little comparison (Examples include Jak II and 3 and Sly Cooper 2 and 3). And that's the environment of the era that Shadow the Hedgehog 2005 released in, and it's very much a post Grand Theft Auto III-styled game. Compare to a more modern take on the character, like Shadow Generations, which is very good, yes, but NEVER ventures into the territory the 2005 game does. It's unique to its era.

I don't actually have THAT much to say about all these routes, let's move on.

The Semi Dark Route

The Semi Dark Route of this game, meanwhile, is to my mind the least interesting story this game has to tell, though I do have a little bit to say about it. The levels along this route are some of the game's less compelling, and the endings are the ones where Shadow grows the least as a character. In particular, one ending has Shadow embracing the Black Arms and accepting his fate as their pawn, and the OTHER ending, well, it feels like the writers couldn't really think of anything for the other ending. Shadow comes to the conclusion that "I, and I alone know what is best." And the game stops there, with none of the central plots resolved and Shadow having learned nothing from his experiences. Honestly, that ending is pretty funny--Shadow comes off as a surly teen, and it's probably the ending that resonated the most with the culture of the time. "Comes off like a surly teen" isn't Shadow supposed to be in his 50s?

Pure Neutral!

I think the neutral route is what most people end up with on their first playthrough--it's the route you go through if you never attempt to do anything but reach the goal ring. It's the first ending I got too, though I ended up on that path after doing the Dark Mission in Mad Matrix, at which point Black Doom, having tried to get Shadow on his side the whole game up to that point, straight up ghosts Shadow even though he appeared to finally throw him a bone. What the hell, man? That's the thing with this game, it's also *very* funny, and it's hard to say if that's on purpose or not.

Narratively, this route follows up on a plot thread from Sonic Heroes where it was suggested that the Shadow from that game might possibly not be the same Shadow from Sonic Adventure 2, and is instead an android created by Dr Eggman. Sure enough, Shadow androids begin appearing towards the end as enemies, lending a bit of a conclusion to the brief cutscene in Sonic Heroes where they had first appeared. Weirdly, the partner you get in the last two levels of this route, Omega, seems to be well aware that the player character is the real deal, and refers to the player as "the original," but Shadow can nevertheless be fully convinced of this Blade Runner-like conceit.

The FUNNIEST route in the game, by a longshot, has you reaching the final level of the Neutral route by switching to the semi dark path after playing Prison Island, and then doing the hero mission in Air Fleet, which puts you back on the neutral path. Playing the game this way results in Shadow coming to the conclusion that he's an android, without ANYONE suggesting the possibility to him, and without Eggman having appared the whole game. Shadow just abandons the whole story to kill an unrelated party as the final boss, and it is AMAZINGLY funny. I have no idea if the developers saw the humor in this stuff, I think they were probably just in crunch mode the full length of development and didn't have much awareness of their own actions, but I like to believe they got to have some fun.

The Semi Hero Route

This route is pretty good, but I don't think I have much to say about it. I usually end up on this route after failing the hero mission in (the quite bad but very aesthetic) Lost Impact, but it works okay narratively. This is the route where the GUN commander convinces Shadow that his childhood best friend's death was his own fault, and the hero ending of this route has Shadow at his absolute saddest, a real wreck of a person. (The dark ending of this route has Shadow fighting Egg Dealer AGAIN, and I should mention that it's a fucking ridiculous boss fight--why would Eggman even build that thing?)

The main note I want to make about this route is that the final level, Cosmic Fall, is EASILY the worst level in the game. It's frustrating, it's confusing, the only way to progress through most of the level is to just guess what the developer intended for you to do and hope the game doesn't kill you for it. It's *rather* bad, and I think it's the main part of the game where the rushed development cycle really makes its presence known.

The Pure Hero Route, BAYBEEEEEEEEEE!

I usually end up in Cosmic Fall after failing the hero mission in Lost Impact, and that means I have to do the Hero Mission in Space Gadget to get to Final Haunt--thankfully, the Hero Mission in Space Gadget might be the single best mission in the game. It's a race, basically--you're racing Sonic to the goal ring, narratively (gameplay wise, Sonic is not present in this level except via voice clips, and you're just trying to beat a timer). Isn't it weird that this is the only level in the game where Shadow and Sonic race each other? Isn't the whole point of this series that the characters can run fast? Anyway, this level is great--the time limit puts a level of stress on the affairs that really improves the experience, and narratively, man. I'm not big into the shipping scene in Sonic the Hedgehog, I don't really care much for Sonadow, but the hero mission of this level has Shadow finally remembering his past, after a friendly act of play from his old rival--this is the route where SONIC reminds Shadow of who he is, and it's honestly just really sweet? These guys really do play well off each other. It's good!

Which brings us to Final Haunt, the last level of the Pure Hero route. The level's okay, but it's saved by the music--it's a chill, positive jam representing Shadow having succesfully reclaimed his own identity--he knows who he is now, and now his success is guaranteed.

Or, you could betray Sonic at the last minute and get a unique ending that way! You are required to do this once to get the true ending, and it's another successful (accidental?) joke on the developer's part.

The Last Story

Okay, now we're going to talk some negatives. I don't think the Last Story of Shadow the Hedgehog sticks the landing. I was kind of hoping for something like the final stories of Sonic Adventure 1 or 2, which feel like the logical conclusions those games had been moving towards their whole runtime--for better or for worse, the true end in Shadow the Hedgehog is not that. It tries to be, though--we finally find out Black Doom's ultimate goal (he wants to take over the world, surprise surprise) and we find out the true nature of Gerald Robotnik's relationship with his creation. And yet... it doesn't feel like the culmination of everything the player had done up to that point, it feels more like the developers realizing they had to provide a "canon" ending to cut away the ambiguity of the story or else fans would get mad at them. It feels like an ending written more for lore afficianados than for people who actually like the characters and enjoyed seeing the different outcomes. And none of this is helped by the gameplay, which consists of a single level with only one mission that consists entirely of assets reused from a couple other levels, and a boss fight that takes place in an empty void. It's a letdown!

Now's probably as good a time as ever to talk about Shadow the Hedgehog Reloaded, a mod for this game that supposedly fixes a lot of its problems. I've... really got some beef with this mod. It's not all bad, I appreciate that it attempts to improve the controls (Shadow is pretty slippery in this game, regretably), but everything else it does seems at odds with what I like about the original game. It reduces the number of things you have to kill/collect in the scavenger hunts, which sometimes messes up the full experience of the levels (since you can miss out on areas of the levels that the scavenger hunts were intended to direct you towards) AND it reduces the number of routes you need to take before reaching the Last Story to just 3. That's not right! The game doesn't work at all unless you see all the ways the story can unfold before finding out the "truth"! You don't even have to play a lot of the levels in this mod! What? On top of that, it replaces the collectible keys in the levels (collect all 5 to unlock an optional goodie on subsequent playthroughs) with the Red Rings from the boost games, which kind of underlies that this mod was intended for people who don't like this game. I mean, that's obvious, it's a mod by people who clearly think the game is flawed. To be more specific, it's a mod for people whose main interest in this game is what it contributes to the "lore" of the series, and play these games purely for the information they provide, not for any emotions or feelings they can evoke. And I agree that this game is not very good if that's all you care about! Cause that's not what this game is about! You could just go to Wikipedia, man! God!

some other negatives

Some of these are kind of hard to forgive, lol

The first level of this game is quite bad, and it's the one level that can least afford to be bad (both cause it's your first impression of the game and cause you have to replay it so many times).

Uh, I agree that sometimes the scavenger missions are a little overbearing. Some of the dark missions where you have to kill GUN soldiers include bonus enemies that you only get one chance to kill and you have to be fast, and add to the number of enemies you've killed but aren't mandatory. They should've done more stuff like that imo, and made enemies in that style for the hero missions too. Lost Impact is the worst example of this problem, I think we can all agree.

The controls are, in fact, pretty slippery.

I hated the missions where you have to destroy a larger enemy as it moves through the level. PROTIP: Wait until you gotten all the endings before attempting to A Rank these stages, beating the last story unlocks a super powerful gun that makes these challenges much easier.

Black Doom is not an interesting villain, sorry. Well, he's interesting on paper... I think the developers intended him as a sort of abusive parental figure for Shadow, and those characters tend to be hard to enjoy. On the other hand, he's ALSO written to be a cruel demon offering Faustian bargains, that Shadow can accept at his own peril--I feel like that aspect of his character doesn't come through narratively at all, though! His offers to Shadow never come off as that tempting, and it usually comes off that Black Doom is taking Shadow's loyalty as a given and has never given thought to the possibility of disobedience. The attempts to add a layer of moral complexity to him are laughable--once in a while (like a couple times in the whole game) he'll talk about how humans are, like, the REAL bad guy, man, and you have to save them from themselves, but even Shadow doesn't seem to care one way or another about this line of reasoning at all.

I'll go so far to say, if we're accepting the Faustian bargain nature of the character as the primary intent of the writers, that MEPHILES, from Sonic 06 of all things, is a much better attempt at that archetype. Shadow never even accepts player input on whether he'll take Mephiles's offer in that game, but Mephiles makes a much better case that he should (his reasoning being that the humans can betray Shadow, AND he offers clear proof that they in fact do!) and other characters (Silver and Blaze, specifically) do fall into his trap, providing the best of both worlds... Black Doom just isn't as compelling a trickster in comparison, and it's hard to say if he was ever meant to be.

Actually... I think that's everything I was going to complain about.

Conclusion

Real fast, I think the Snapcube Penny Parker cover of "All of Me" is better than the original:

I keep trying to sing along but each time I get to "walk into my mystery" I start crying like a baby lol

Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) has blown my mind in 2025. Something I forgot to mention is that, compared to a lot of quote unquote "good" videogames, Shadow fits very neatly into my life and how I play games--a single playthrough is an hour or two long, and the idea is that you just play through it over and over until you see everything. I like that *a lot* more than something that requires hours of investment for me at a time, that can take weeks if not months to reach a satisfying conclusion (not naming names, cause that seems mean! Some popular games, man)! It's the perfect game *for me.* I don't just think "it doesn't deserve the hate," I think it's *AMAZING*. It came out at a weird time for Sonic and for 3D platformers, and it's definitely got its quirks, but this is a game I suspect I will be thinking about for many years, and that's beautiful.

Here's the thing about my discovery that I love this game: It makes me suspicious of tastemakers. Magazine reviewers of the 2000s, clickbait Youtubers, streamers, they all LIED, for NO REASON, about this game being bad! And I believed them until just last year! Why did I believe them! If THIS GAME, this BEAUTIFUL GAME, can get its reputation sullied so hard by people who want to feel cool for being "above it," then what else have I been lied to about? What other games, movies, etc have I missed out on because of bad press, that I would've LOVED? And how deep does it go? Am I just wrong about art, philosophy, politics, EVERYTHING????? IS THE STRUCTURE OF MY ENTIRE LIFE BUILT ON THE SANDS OF BULLSHIT?!?!

Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) isn't just a good game, it's a game that makes me want to find more art like it. Or, if not "like it," more art from unexpected places that touches me in my veins. There's gotta be more out there! I need to play as much as I can! What else have I missed for taking for granted? Precisely how MUCH beauty does our planet Earth HAVE in it?

Maybe I should give YIIK (2019), a shot. Maybe that's a good place to start, maybe that'll be the next thing that's gonna blow my mind. See you there, Alex! *dark mission completed!*

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A quick personal note: I'm very influenced by videogames, and you can see that influence all over my webcomic. You're probably going to be seeing me incorporate some of the stuff I liked about Shadow 2005 into my comic, whenever I get around to working out how. You've already seen that maze page from earlier, but that's all you're going to see for at least a year, since I've got some plans for stuff I wanted to do in 2026 that I've already worked out. I am obliged to see it through to its conclusion. At some point, though!