$2.39 (−80%)Shio Lanterns, storms and a buried story
Leap between floating lanterns across a hand-drawn world where the weather changes everything.
Is Shio worth it?
Shio is worth it if…
- you want a platformer that demands real skill and does not apologize for it
- you liked the precision and repetition of Super Meat Boy or I Wanna-style games
- you enjoy a story told in fragments, riddles and things left unsaid
- you care about hand-drawn art and a soundtrack written for each chapter
Screenshots
Jumping from lantern to lantern
The whole game hangs on one idea: lit lanterns are your footholds. You jump, swing your lantern to light the next one, and chain your way upward through the air. Different lanterns do different things as the game goes on, some move, some go dark, some change the world around them, so the same simple jump keeps asking something new of you. There are no enemies to fight. The environment is the only thing out to stop you, and it stops at nothing. The controls are tight and quick to answer, which matters, because you will be pressing them a lot.
Weather that rewrites the level
The game is split into four chapters, and each has its own mood and weather, and the weather is not decoration. Under a blazing sun, beams of heat and fireballs shape the route. Wind pushes you mid-air, sometimes to your death, sometimes exactly where you need to go. Fog hides the traps and the path ahead, so you creep and guess. In the final downpour, lanterns flicker on and off, and your whole rhythm has to bend around them. Learning what each kind of weather does to the level is half the game.
A masked man and a sad, hidden story
You play a silent figure in a mask, and nobody, including the game, tells you outright who he is or what he is looking for. The people you meet speak in riddles. The real story sits off the obvious path: hidden rooms hold letters and fragments, and piecing them together is the only way to understand what happened. It is a melancholy, mysterious tale told almost entirely through suggestion, and finding its pieces is its own quiet reward. If you only follow the main road, you will finish knowing far less than the world was willing to tell you.
How hard is Shio, really?
How hard is Shio, really?
Very. This is a game built for players who like being pushed: most people find it fast and extremely difficult, and many will bounce off it. You will die hundreds of times on a single stretch, learn the exact rhythm of every trap, and replay sections until your hands know them by heart. Later chapters are especially demanding, and checkpoints can be far apart, so a single mistake can cost a long run. If that sounds like your kind of evening, it delivers. If it sounds like a chore, it will feel like one.
Does the story make sense if you just play through?
Not fully, and that is by design. The surface gives you a masked man, a strange village and characters who talk in circles. The actual story lives in hidden rooms and scattered letters, and players who find them describe something genuinely sad and moving underneath the jumping. Treat the exploration as part of the point: the more you dig, the more the ending means.
What does the music add?
Each chapter has its own original score, and it carries a lot of the atmosphere. The music sets the tone for every weather change, from bright mornings to fog-soaked temples, and it is one of the parts people consistently single out. Fair warning from those same players: when you are dying to the same trap for the twentieth time, you may be too tense to properly listen.
