Game Review | Masquerada: Songs and Shadows

Masquerada: Songs and Shadows seems to be a bit of an oddity. Not often, have I seen a game take place in a renaissance fantasy world. Sure there are games where players are in the renaissance, like in Assassin’s Creed 2, but that’s a bit more grounded. There’s also a level in Dishonored where Corvo is out to neutralize Lady Boyle at a fancy shindig, but Masquerada fully embraces this setting, while creating it’s own rich set of lore that you can get lost in. You can feel the history radiating from the varied places you visit throughout the game.

There’s also diction that just adds to the mystique. The Sixth Canticle, The War of Bearings, Dimenticate, and The Eterea: Merumento and Mecantare. It’s a lot to take in at first trying to keep these historical names and groups in order, but hearing this kind of lexicon really makes you feel like a foreigner on foreign shores, where every first hand experience of the culture won’t sink in immediately.

While Masquerada didn’t hook me in from the onset, especially with the seemingly deep reservoirs of its world’s chronicles, the more I played, the more the game opened up. The first couple of hours stumbled a little bit, but once I got to know the main characters, acquired more powerful skills, and got waist deep into the political intrigue, I became invested with the story. It’s a weird combination yes, fantasy and renaissance, but it works, and it works pretty well.

The Citte

Masquerada takes place in a wonderfully imagined Venetian city, the turmoil ridden Citte della Ombre. It’s a place where songs are sung for one’s deeds giving them a lasting legacy after one’s death. As long as one has the slightest amount of power they’ll do whatever they can for their songs to live on through the generations. And this power comes in the form of the mascherines, essentially masks, that grant their wielders the ability to conjure the destructive elements of air, earth, fire and water.

In the middle of all this, you’ll follow the story as Cicero Gavar, who has been summoned back to Ombre to investigate the disappearance of a diplomat named Razitof Azrus. Soon you’ll meet members of the Masquerada that will join Cicero on his journey, each with their own backgrounds and personal secrets.

Full Control

As you can see, Masquerada utilizes an isometric view for exploration and combat. Each party member gets their own set of mostly unique skills that they can acquire as the story progresses. Each skill has a set of nodes that can be further developed. For instance with Cicero he can add more focus regeneration, which is the bar that depletes with each use of elemental magic. In certain sections you’ll have to choose one of two nodes to continue developing the skill, giving the player a choice of how to build the skill set for that character. Seeing as I chose the earth element for Cicero, the skill, earthen blade, could be chosen to have taunt or invigorate. With taunt, a non earth elemental tag – of which I’ll explain tags in a moment – activates, and the target will be forced to attack Cicero for three seconds. If I chose invigorate, Cicero will recover 20% of his maximum focus and mask charge whenever an earth tag is activated.

So let’s talk about combat. It reminds me a lot of Dragon Age: Origins. The basic attack is used by pressing R2 and the skills that you decide to acquire will appear on the four face buttons. Of course there are more abilities to gain to swap in and out, as you see fit. As more skills are developed, there are certain skills that each party member can use that inflicts an elemental tag on an enemy. If that tag is activated with another skill, additional effects are invoked. For example at the start of the game you’re tasked to use coldstream wash as Cyrus. This applies a water tag to an enemy, and when he uses his signature move, the iceblade, the damage dealt will be more significant. So using this system it’s possible to set up some devastating attacks.

And throughout all this chaos you can pause combat at any time to give yourself a tactical advantage. Now I paused a lot when I played Dragon Age: Origins, so you can imagine that I do the same in Masquerada, especially with the harder battles that require positioning the squad away from enemy attack circles and lines. You can also set the AI to do specific things with their skills that include which ones to use more often, and activation under certain conditions. It feels pretty robust and with the right skills and AI parameters, the party can feel like a well oiled machine. You can even disable AI and micromanage the use of every skill for all your party members, if that’s your thing.

Of course I can’t talk about the combat without the mascherines. During your travels you’ll find raw mascherines, brand new ones other than your default mask, and they must first be decorated before they can be activated, and lucky for us they’re decorated on behalf of the Tvoth twins, your carriage drivers. Though it will take a little while before this point in the game is reached. These new masks give you different super abilities depending on which one you wear. For instance the Quagmire mask surrounds Cicero in an aura that reduces enemy movement and attack by 25% while the Grotesque mask makes you stationary like a rock as you heal. Each party member has their own set of masks as well, giving the entire group numerous possibilities for these battle shifting powers.

The Cast

It was during a dialogue sequence with Kalden Azrus in the small town of Sailheart where I actually began caring for these fully voiced characters. The voice acting is amazing by the way. It was a very personal conversation that Cicero had with Kalden that surprised Cicero, but it was also full of acceptance. The voice acting was done with great care and I really felt the turmoil that Kalden was feeling. The initial meeting with Kalden was a simple matter of revenge, but as the main story beats progressed, Kalden opens up more and we even get to see a slice of the life that he lives.

With Amadea Invidius, a spear wielding, ruin spelunking recluse, she’s developed a mercenary attitude toward relationships, so when it came to a tragic event that happened to her during the story, it was such a contrast seeing her in emotional anguish. I felt that pain, her loss, her sadness, and for someone who usually responded in short answers, I was genuinely worried as to how she would move on from that and I wanted to look out for her well being. So much so I decided to always have her in my party and make sure to have dialogue with her before missions. That’s crazy right? But it was my reaction to her grief.

Of course there are more members that make up this investigative party including the golden armored Tiziana De Felici and the shadowy Vasco Tessitore. As you begin to get to know the team you’ve assembled, you start understanding them, where they came from, their motivations, their thoughts, and I feel that’s tantamount to creating a well-knit cohesive party that you want to stay by until the end.

A Fantastical Renaissance

Now I’m not one to really know about various renaissance styles throughout the ages, but the word I would use to describe the look of the game is, classical, especially when it comes to the architecture of the innards of the White Spire. The lines are clean and deliberate and just look very neat in general. The decorative aspects are great almost as if I was there staring at the lines in fine detail. There’s symmetry, proportion and geometry in the designs that gives Masquerada a hand drawn aesthetic, that literally makes me stare often at how beautiful this world is that I’m exploring.

While other areas aren’t as awe inspiring as the White Spire, the rest of the varied locales you visit are just as gorgeous, even if some areas are shadowy and decrepit, but that’s a testament to the great art direction Masquerada houses. Highlights include purple caverns with glowing crystals on the walls with the color range of a rainbow, overgrown ruins with mysterious etchings, villages with seedy gangs and dirt roads, beautiful courtyards with slowly falling leaves, and so much more. And while each area is mostly linear, there’s still room to stray off the beaten path to find raw mascherines, lore spots, and even cats chasing rats.

Eventually when you gather enough party members you’ll be taken to the Astiguary, a base of sorts where you can talk to your party members, train and reset skills, have the twins make new masks, and choose the make up of your group when you decide to head out. It’s a lovely place that looks like a vacation house with an amazing garden on the outside and a bar on the inside adorned with wooden trim.

Of course the graphics extend to the characters themselves as they are all highly detailed, with fancy clothes, decorative armors, and bold lines that really bring them to life. And those bosses, wow, their animations are superb and provide a nice challenge. Early on, the Triplet fight was a standout and about mid-way through, a struggle with a giant rooted tree shows the scale the game can capture. There are many more boss battles in these water colored painted landscapes and each location is a treat for the eyes. A small nitpick though is that the PS4’s framerates can stutter at times with a lot of action on the screen, while the PC version Q played, which has been out for almost a year, maintains a smooth experience.

Final Verdict

Initially, I was hesitant on the renaissance setting, but it goes to show that if effort is made in creating a vast world with rich and interesting lore, it makes the experience like a good book, where I wanted to immerse myself fully. And all this is wrapped up in some fairly competent squad based gameplay and beautifully realized hand painted graphics. Masquerada: Songs and Shadows surprised me. I was expecting something on the boring side, but what I got was an interesting story and characters that I cared about. Plus the masks, the masks are pretty cool.

The copy of Masquerada: Songs and Shadows used for this review was supplied by its publisher Witching Hour Studios.