Shadows of Forbidden Gods on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Take on the role of a Dark Elder God and lead your agents to bring about an apocalypse in a fantasy world. Work in the shadows, avoiding the heroes who will try to stop you, as you bring about plague and famine, ice age and volcanic destruction, madness and never ending night.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is a strategy, simulation and god game game
developed by Bobby Two Hands
and published by Forbidden Oak Games Limited.
Released on July 15th 2023 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 928 reviews of which 860 were positive and 68 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 16.79€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Shadows of Forbidden Gods into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: Intel i5-2500 or equivalent
- Memory: 1024 MB RAM
- Graphics: Integrated Graphics
- Storage: 1 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
TL; DR I like this game, but I could have loved it, there is a lot to enjoy about it, emergent stories, fun ways to end the world, it is fun and all, but a lot of the mechanics are underdeveloped and lacking in depth. So, while you have fun you will end up feeling a bit disappointed that you could not do more . Note turn off the in-game music and listen to Atramentus instead, bring about an eternal winter in style. Story in the great history of our world there have been numerous deities, but only the fools take comfort in false idols offering safety, and everlasting joy. Gods are awakening, the real gods, the true gods, they rouse, and we are their heralds, the fields will burn, the cities plunged into anarchy, the dead will feast in the streets, terrors will rise from the depths, but our great work is just beginning, the world must be prepared for their coming, so that the world may end. Shadows of Forbidden Gods does not have a true story, it is a Cultist Simulator and you direct your pawns to bring about an apocalypse, whatever stories you experience must emerge while playing and are therefore unique to your playthrough but there are common themes, and characters. Humans are brittle and quick to corrupt, the Chosen One will rally the uncorrupted against you, but you have access to a number of unique archetypes (such as the last giant, or the Monarch). It is the duty of the Monarch to create an Empire of Darkness filled with subservient souls too numb to stop the apocalypse, just as how it is the Chosen One’s destiny to try and fail to fight against the end of all they have ever held dear. However, this all means that you can safely ignore any narrative if you want to, but I find something charming in this authorless tale, there is something real to it, and the way you can corrupt troublesome heroes to your side, drive them to madness or the send their homelands into internecine wars over slights, is funny, and makes for an entertaining time. You can also create some very cinematic encounters, such as the Chosen One desperately trying to strike down the Survivor from opposite ends of the world, as the giant calls down the glacial black winds of Atramentus and as each and every turn more and more towns are destroyed, more and more people die, as he finally avenges his people, and destroys humanity. Presentation This game is just a mass of hexes, and I would have wanted a more expansive zoom. It is impossible to get a panoptic view, and you are frequently panning left, right, up, down, while holding your cursor in one specific place of the screen because you cannot lockdown a modifier and have to keep hovering over it if you want to check famine levels aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh. In other words, it is a bit intimidating when you are first starting out because it is hard to get an actual read of what is going on, which is a bit of a problem when you are trying to end the world. I do not know if Shadows of Forbidden Gods has one track or several, I did not pay attention, because whatever it was it did not hold my attention for long. Suffice to say that acoustic music does not exactly evoke the feelings of dread that the game needs. So yeah, listen to Atramentus, or Bell Witch instead. Gameplay Emergent narratives are fun, of course, but Shadows of Forbidden Gods is a game, and games are meant to be played, so… how does it play? Well, you control a small selection of cultists and use them to undermine the established order, you are always outnumbered so you lay low and stick to the shadows until you have caused enough damage to escalate. This means you will be waiting a lot in the early game but that things will ramp up in intensity as you continue to conspire, and as your god slowly awakens. Your deity will inform your place style, whether you focus on spreading darkness, madness, or if you are building up the alternative to the darkness, an all-consuming light under your direct control. In any case, if you are too brazen, you will be caught, not only will the uncorrupted armies harass you, but heroes will start hunting you down, and when they find you… you might be able to kill them if you have a good retinue and some cool artifacts, but most of the time you will die. Does the Dark God care for a tool? Of course not, but they do care for fun toys, and if your agent was useful, it seems a bit counterproductive to lose them out of foolhardiness, better to kill them off when you are ready to cut them loose. In the meanwhile, however, they have a value, maybe they will cultivate a Deep One Cult, just undermine a kingdom with some well-placed scandals, or covert assassinations, why not have them harass the countryside and start a famine? Perhaps a plague or two? All of that, and more is possible in Shadows of Forbidden Gods , and that is the whole appeal, it is fun to cause mayhem, it is fun to start internecine wars at the very end of the world, and it is fun to destroy humanity, in a video game. Like magic, magic is awesome, if you prepare enough for the highest tiers of magic you can summon forth an ice age, change the lay of the land with a volcano, or summon armies of undead to feast on unsuspecting, and undefended borderlands. Getting to that point might take an entire game, this is not a joke, if you play with “Magical Arms Race”, you will be hard-pressed to find any Arcane Secrets to increase your learning because everyone will want them, not to mention that if you play with Holy Orders (religions) a bunch of religious fanatics will run about destroying all our arcane tomes. So, you will either run out of time, or you will have to cultivate plagues, commit mass murder &cetera to generate enough souls for arcane research, which will cause so much devastation that you might win from just that. You end up in an awkward position of not wanting to remove a fun aspect of the game or keeping them and neutering magic to the point of making it (nearly) useless. So, Shadows of Forbidden Gods is not as great as it could have been, it has a wide array of options, but all your options are limited and not as well developed as you might hope. Combat is as barebones as it can possible get, which is not much of an issue since its just there, but you start having issues when more central concepts are underbaked, in fact it is difficult to find any mechanic that has been taken to its logical endpoint, everything leaves you wanting more, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is unfortunate. I think the most illustrating example is the Deep One Cult, you can, if you want, start Deep One Cults that infiltrate societies, and eventually kill off the last pure humans in the town. Cool, but all you do is keep their menace, and profile to a minimum, i.e. the same thing you do for your agents, intermittently feeding them cash, or holy power to keep them growing. That is the entire extent of it, besides one thing, you can curse a noble line and in so doing getting a few uncontrollable fishmen running about starting new cults for you to babysit. I love cursing the nobility, but man, it really sucks that there is not more to it, and the community agrees because there is a workshop mod for the Deep Ones as well as the Orcs. However, if you are fine with that level of depth, then this is nothing to worry about, and you will enjoy Shadows of Forbidden Gods .
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Imagine a game that's really three games happening at the same time, and you're only playing one of them. 80% of the AI is playing Crusader Kings II, the other 20% is playing Call of Cthulhu, and you? You're Cthulhu.
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I don't quite understand the complaints with the UI, simply because personally I've had no issues with understanding what was occurring. The game is difficult and I've had many plans go up in flames and I'd have to pick my evil God self up and redo some of the hard work I spent thinking it would bring success. And like what other people said, don't expect to win every time. I have had times where I got all the way to awakening and then the hero was able to pull through at the last moment and my whole evil plans come tumbling down and I lose. I've also had it go the other way where I completely corrupted and made the hero relatively useless through my grand scheme. My favorite is having the hero believe I am attempting something external to their human kingdom of choice but it turns out I infiltrated in and teared down all the hard work the hero was doing and letting it burn. Even though it does not have its own story, I love the stories I have made with it. Another of my favorites was focusing external with an orc empire and was able to actually make a large empire with my warlord. I truly was getting perpared to break the alliance and I had an almost equivalent military stature with my orc empire to the whole light alliance. Then they realized the threat and the hero led a genocide against my empire and started killing off all the orcs trying to hunt and find my warlord. My warlord I had hiding after losing horrifically in a major battle that sealed the fate of the empire. I was extremely frustrated because I built this gigantic empire from nothing and it was pure skill and manuevering to avoid direct confrontation. And at the split moment the alliance committed genocide against my orcs. Then they hunted and killed my warlord in a last stand with my final orc army and my hard work in building that character was gone in glorious last stand against the alliance. I was certain of defeat as the alliance continued their genocide, I had 5 tiles left and no plan and I had another orc warlord preparing for another last stand to hurt the alliance as much as possible on the final fortress. I was flailing like any Dark Elder God that does not want to lose hoping anything would save my crumbling Orc Empire. I threw everything at the wall because otherwise I had to start from scratch and it was already like turn 200... I finally assassinated the hero. The alliance crumbled into internal strife (my doing by flailing) and the armies of the alliance pulled from my orc lands. That allowed me to have some breathing room and rebuild the empire that fell. With this respite and internal strife was enough for me to convert a kingdom into the Dark Empire. Then with my two empires I crusaded against the remaining light and brought forth the apocalypse and pulled a victory from near defeat which allowed me to conquer the remaining kingdoms on the continent. The remaining stranglers lived on islands and had no hope of achieving real success against the military might of both my Orc and Dark empires. I have also had Dark Empire games where I formulated the empire and the hero immediately fights and kills the monarch which left my empire into a weak character's hands and then the alliance push through and crumbled the empire I spent so long into formulating. Needless to say. No plan survives first contact with the hero. Have a plan of attack to start, but also prepare your other contingency plans and entrap the hero in a box with no hope of success and live out your Dark God dreams.
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The game looks like absolute shit. The UX is terrible and it is not quite clear what things do. But man is it very original in its take on an strategy game where you play as the evil eldritch god. My only complaint aside from how rough the UI is that the meta tends to sort of shake out the same. Most gods, even if their mechanics and personal abilities are different, still end up playing into slowly building up, avoiding shadow like the plague to avoid threat, and then quickly rushing enshadows to win on enshadowing everyone. Maybe I just suck, but trying to popkill or getting factions to kill each other rarely works without already having high shadow, by which point you don't need to popkill or in-fight since you want the shadow to spread and passing agents to enshadow too (plus giving heroes and agents something to do that isnt killing you).
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It is incredibly rare that I will play a game for a few sessions at launch, come back to it a full year later, and then completely lose track of time for 3 hours straight. The simplest description I can give is the AI is playing a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings. You however are different. You're playing a dark ancient evil god trying to carefully puppeteer your way to victory. You don't have much direct influence (at first), but you have loyal followers who carry out your will across the world. The level of depth here is pretty astounding, and it can be a bit overwhelming on your first game. I think going in expecting to lose the first time is a good policy. I really didn't have a full grasp on what I was doing for most of the first game, but I was so fascinated I played a few more. Honestly a banger, also the art if BEAUTIFUL.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is currently priced at 16.79€ on Steam.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 16.79€ on Steam.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods received 860 positive votes out of a total of 928 achieving a rating of 8.72.
😎
Shadows of Forbidden Gods was developed by Bobby Two Hands and published by Forbidden Oak Games Limited.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is not playable on MacOS.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is not playable on Linux.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for Shadows of Forbidden Gods. Explore additional content available for Shadows of Forbidden Gods on Steam.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods does not support Steam Remote Play.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Shadows of Forbidden Gods.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 29 July 2025 10:12 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 26 July 2025 15:22 |
| Steam price | 30 July 2025 04:49 |
| Steam reviews | 29 July 2025 17:46 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Shadows of Forbidden Gods, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Shadows of Forbidden Gods
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Shadows of Forbidden Gods concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Shadows of Forbidden Gods compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
25
Developer
Bobby Two Hands
Publisher
Forbidden Oak Games Limited
Release
15 Jul 2023
Platforms