I love rogues, bows, backstabs, silent takedowns, sneaking, and skulduggery in my games—if you do too, you should pay attention to the upcoming first person stealth game Project Shadowglass, which recently began showing off its first gameplay and development details.
The first thing that caught my attention with Shadowglass is its visual style, which developer Starhelm describes as “revolutionary 3D pixel art graphics.” It looks crunchy, warm, vibrant, and nostalgic—the hero shot of the player cresting a hill to see a castle town looming over a placid bay feels like someone took a Hiroshi Nagai painting, made it fantasy, then got it all software render pixelated like Cultic, one of the best-looking PC games of the 2020s in my book.
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It’s real pretty, but Starhelm is also making some exciting promises on the gameplay front: Shadowglass is planned to be an immersive sim drawing on the stealth game GOAT, Thief: The Dark Project. Shadowglass will have open-ended levels inhabited by guards and traps, while mention of daytime heist planning and persistent consequences makes it sound like Shadowglass will have an open-ended, interconnected world.
That’s something Thief 3 tried, but couldn’t quite stick the landing on. Perhaps most exciting of all for immsim sickos like myself: Starhelm has already shown off a prototype for rigorously simulated 3D audio that ties into the stealth gameplay, something the original Thief games managed but no developer has ever surpassed.
Based on an early Q&A video from developer Dominick John, it sounds like Starhelm consists of a small team working on Project Shadowglass alongside other work. “I do have a day job, so every waking minute of my life that I’m not working is spent on this,” John said in the video. Despite that squeeze, John is adamant that Shadowglass will remain AI-free.
“It’s not AI, it’s real, I’m real—as far as I know,” said John. “No art, no content, no sound will be generated with AI. That’s the fun I and the other artists would like to have.” Project Shadowglass does not currently have a release window, but you can wishlist it on Steam and follow development via the game’s official website or John’s account on X, “The Everything App.”
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