Earth’s Shadow, A Sci-Fi Dungeon Crawler Adventure – Early Access – SPONSORED CONTENT
One crash landing. One black alien world. Five bosses somewhere in the darkness. And, apparently, an unlimited supply of opportunities to turn explosions into slow-motion action scenes.
Our first proper journey into Earth’s Shadow started as an early-access exploration of planet Sumbra and ended nearly five hours later with two bosses defeated, a mysterious prisoner freed, several spectacular deaths, a few genuine bugs, and enough slow-motion footage to build an entire highlight reel.
🌌 About the Game
Earth’s Shadow is a third-person sci-fi action dungeon crawler set in the year 3081 on Sumbra, a remote alien planet surrounded by legends of valuable ancient relics.
Those stories have drawn greedy and brave explorers hoping to secure a brighter future. Unfortunately, Sumbra has a habit of turning hopeful expeditions into wreckage, and beneath its ruins lies a much darker history than anyone expected.
After crash-landing on the planet, our immediate task is to reach higher ground and restore communications. Of course, if a few priceless relics happen to fall into our inventory along the way, early retirement suddenly starts sounding very appealing.
🚀 Where We Are in the Journey
This episode marks the beginning of our Earth’s Shadow adventure, with Story Mode chosen for the first full run.
That meant learning everything from scanning and teleporting to weapons, access cards, environmental puzzles and character upgrades while gradually pushing deeper into Sumbra. Being an early-access build, it also meant paying attention to what worked brilliantly and what might still need a little refinement before release.
🔥 What Happens in This Episode
The opening areas eased us into Sumbra with strange ruins, alien creatures and plenty of vertical exploration. Scanning quickly became essential for picking out enemies and environmental details, while teleport points offered a way to move around areas that were often much taller and more complicated than they first appeared. Access cards began opening previously blocked routes, weapons started filling the inventory, and the first symbol and component puzzles provided rather more head-scratching than actual solving.
“Always remember to look up” quickly became genuinely useful advice as teleport points, enemies and routes appeared above us. The character’s dreadlock-like silhouette immediately triggered Predator comparisons too, beginning an evening of sci-fi references that wandered through Alien, Dead Space, Deep Space Nine, War of the Worlds and eventually Max Payne. Anything resembling an alien egg was treated with appropriate suspicion because, as I pointed out, I have “seen that movie.” Naturally, this did not stop us investigating ominous corpses and suspicious alien objects from far closer than was probably advisable.
Being an early-access build, part of the evening was also about seeing where Earth’s Shadow still needed some refinement. Spoken dialogue could be extremely quiet compared with some of the sound effects, tutorial text was difficult to read in places, and notifications occasionally disappeared before there was enough time to understand what they were telling us. These were genuine issues, but they never really got in the way of enjoying the exploration.
Things became considerably less sensible when I accidentally discovered that pressing Z activated slow motion.
From that point onward, actual progress had competition. Jumps became action shots, teleport dashes became cinematic sequences, re-materialising after a warp suddenly needed to be admired properly, and every explosive object became something that absolutely had to be detonated in slow motion. With no obvious cooldown preventing repeated use, I started marking moments for clips almost immediately. By the end of the stream, I had to admit we probably could have made considerably more progress if I had not spent so much time trying to turn ordinary encounters into miniature action movies.
It was worth it, though. Especially the explosions.
Sumbra soon started fighting back properly. Bugs, flying creatures, robots, turrets and crystal-producing enemies steadily increased the pressure, while a particularly irritating parasite cloud became one of the recurring problems of the night. Being near it offered double experience, but it also regenerated nearby enemies, which could turn what should have been a manageable encounter into something considerably more exhausting. I knew alien dust was somehow supposed to deal with the parasite, but knowing that and working out exactly how to use it proved to be two different things.
The increasingly sophisticated tactical response became “run away,” occasionally combined with “bouncy bouncy” whenever the game’s floatier jumping sent us bounding around the landscape. When neither of those worked, there was always the “Halo run”: ignore as much of the level as possible, sprint towards the objective and hope the game gives up trying to kill you before you reach it. Sometimes this worked surprisingly well. Sometimes it demonstrated exactly why it should not have worked.
Health became its own recurring drama. Healing seemed scarce during the early stages, and several areas were tackled with the health bar reduced to little more than a handful of pixels. That brought the old low-health bingo-card joke roaring back, with chat offering the wonderfully practical advice that “health is for noobs.” Unfortunately, health carried between areas, so surviving one encounter by the narrowest possible margin often just meant entering the next one already halfway to disaster.
I experimented with equipment, level-up points, regeneration and resistance bonuses while repeatedly insisting that we did not need health anyway. Eventually alien organs proved considerably more useful than they initially appeared, providing regeneration that became particularly important later in the stream. Before that discovery, however, there were plenty of moments where simply remaining alive felt like a bigger achievement than whatever objective we were actually supposed to be completing.
Early access also produced a couple of unexpected adventures of its own. At one point I managed to jump into the terrain and became completely trapped. Jumping did nothing, crouching did nothing, walking did nothing, and eventually returning to the menu became the only solution. That fixed the problem but reset the area’s enemies, meaning we had the pleasure of fighting through them again. Later, a death left the character in an odd state where I could still fire and twitch despite technically being dead, requiring another reload.
Rather than souring the evening, these moments became part of our ongoing look at the game. Alongside everything we were enjoying, there were constructive suggestions around healing balance, dialogue and sound mixing, larger tutorial fonts and giving notifications a little longer on screen.
Chat remained busy throughout all of this, helping turn repeated disasters into running comedy. “Blame Chrissy” made an early appearance, while Easy Guy arrived with a raid and immediately brought the familiar “flip it” jokes back into circulation. His Farming Simulator streams have developed a certain reputation for vehicles ending up in positions their manufacturers probably never intended, so naturally I had to ask whether anything had been flipped that evening.
Even the game’s ancient relics were not safe. Once Sumbra was described as a planet filled with relics, chat predictably found a way to turn that into another Easy Guy joke. The raid landed at just the right time to introduce a fresh group of viewers to the low-health, slow-motion phase of the expedition, and several people liked what they saw enough to say Earth’s Shadow was going onto their Steam wishlists.
Eventually, however, Sumbra presented something we could not simply bounce past.
The first substantial boss became the biggest wall of the evening so far. Getting there was difficult enough, but defeating it turned into a multi-attempt campaign where every death meant fighting or running our way back through the surrounding enemies. One attack could remove almost the entire health bar, the stronger weapon overheated rapidly, and keeping enough health alive long enough to actually learn the fight became part of the challenge.
By around the fifth attempt, confidence was not exactly overflowing. I tried using the arena’s explosives, dashing away whenever the boss closed the distance and circling terrain in an effort to make its pathfinding work in our favour. At one point I patiently allowed the secondary weapon to recharge while joking that all this careful preparation would probably result in one shot that barely dented the thing.
Slowly, though, its health came down. Eventually there was barely an inch left on the bar. The boss briefly seemed to disappear, causing a moment of confusion before the rather wonderful realisation arrived that it had actually died.
Relief was immediate. So was the concern that something else might kill us before we had time to enjoy it.
Progress beyond the boss opened a darker, crypt-like bonus area filled with hidden routes, cramped passages and more puzzles. A rotating mechanism immediately brought Skyrim to mind, while another section involved carrying a cube to a pedestal and crawling beneath passages as I gradually became less certain where I had already been. The later symbol-matching puzzle involving triangles, circles and squares was mercifully easier to understand than the earlier “funny circle” puzzle.
Inventory management became another problem as loot accumulated faster than useful space. Lower-level equipment had to be dropped or converted into scrap, while some of the environments and creatures began reminding me of WRF Studios’ earlier game Vampirium.
It was during this section, while I was thoroughly lost in the catacombs, that the developer from WRF Studios appeared in chat. That turned the exploration into an informal Q&A while I continued wandering around looking for the correct route. We talked about the game’s roughly year-long development and whether multiplayer might ever happen, particularly because a two-player version of some of these boss fights sounded extremely appealing. There were no immediate plans for it, although it was something that could potentially be considered.
Naturally, I also demonstrated the evening’s most important discovery to the person responsible for the game: slow-motion jumps, dashes and explosions. The main request was simple — please do not take that feature away.
Not long after, we found another arena that looked suspiciously like a trap. The door closed, a shielded boss appeared, and things immediately became unpleasant. This creature could attack around corners and repeatedly summoned minions, forcing us to keep moving while managing an overheating weapon and yet another health bar that seemed permanently determined to approach zero.
The developer explained that those minions were deliberate. Early testing had apparently shown that the boss was too easy without them, and they also provided health during the fight. That information was useful, although it did not make being surrounded by them feel substantially more relaxing.
A level-up unexpectedly restored health at one crucial moment and bought us a little more time. By then I had also worked out that alien organs could slowly regenerate health, giving us another way to drag the fight out long enough to survive. After plenty more dashing, retreating, overheating weapons and complaints about the boss constantly inviting more friends to the party, it finally fell.
“Relief” was about the only appropriate response.
The developer then confirmed there were five bosses in total. We had defeated two of them, which meant Sumbra still had another three waiting somewhere ahead.
The closing stretch delivered the evening’s biggest story development. The mysterious woman glimpsed earlier finally spoke directly to us, explaining that she had been following our progress since seeing the ship crash. She was trapped within the ruins and needed the generators powering her containment field destroyed.
Once we freed her, the situation became considerably stranger. She explained that she had once been human and had crash-landed on Sumbra long ago while searching for a way home. According to her, there was no escape. The planet was littered with wrecks and the ghosts of other travellers who had arrived before us and never managed to leave.
Before we could get much further, a hooded figure appeared, announced that “the princess” was coming with him, and vanished with her.
So that seems perfectly safe.
There was still time for another small puzzle and, naturally, one more explosion because apparently I am incapable of walking past something that can make a satisfying boom. After around four hours and forty minutes, with the real-world clock approaching 2 a.m., we finally called the expedition there.
Two of five bosses were down, the imprisoned woman had been released and immediately whisked away again, our equipment had improved substantially, and Sumbra had gone from an interesting alien dungeon-crawling destination to a place with a much larger mystery hanging over it. Despite the bugs and some balancing and readability issues, it had been a genuinely fun first journey — particularly once the movement, scanning and, yes, slow-motion mechanics started to click.
Most importantly, we were nowhere near finished. Three bosses were still waiting, the identity and importance of the mysterious “princess” remained unresolved, and the wrecks of all those stranded travellers suggested there was much more buried in Sumbra’s past. The plan was already to return for another journey into Earth’s Shadow — preferably with just as many explosions, although perhaps with slightly more health.
🎥 Watch the Episode
You can watch the full descent into Sumbra here:
Watch Earth’s Shadow on YouTube
Continue the adventure through the Earth’s Shadow playlist, and visit the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel for more gameplay, livestreams and ongoing series.
If you enjoy the episode, remember to like, leave a comment and subscribe.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The ruins are much more entertaining when the expedition has a crew behind it.
Come join us live on Twitch or YouTube, where chat gets to experience the discoveries, disasters, raids and unexpected moments as they happen.
🛰️ Community & Links
The expedition continues well beyond a single stream. If you want to join the wider crew, keep up with new adventures or simply see what chaos is happening next, there are plenty of ways aboard.
For the community gathering point, join us on Discord.
For transmissions across the wider network, find me on TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X.
For something to listen to between missions, my music is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
If you would like to support the channel, you can visit the Fourthwall shop, Teespring store or Streamlabs.
For more projects beyond the gaming universe, explore the Business Centre, download the brochure, learn more about me or visit the blog.
🌑 Until the Next Descent
Two bosses down. Three still waiting. A mysterious princess has disappeared into the darkness, and Sumbra clearly has far more secrets buried beneath its ruins.
We will be returning to Earth’s Shadow. Until then, keep looking up — and if something starts glowing ominously, make sure the slow-motion button is ready.
— Dr Ravenholm
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