Reviews
[Review] ‘The Shrouded Isle’ Brings Wickedly Enjoyable Cult Management to the Switch
Take control of a cult, and try to appease a Lovecraftian deity before the end of the world. Find out if it’s worth the hassle in The Shrouded Isle review for the Nintendo Switch.
Morality in games can bring up grim dilemmas, and most times they’ll be sure to wrench your heart and mind as you decide fates. In Kitfox Games’ The Shrouded Isle, morality is already out of the window from the start. It’s instead, all about how you manipulate those around you without getting any vengeful splashback. You have to kill and abuse just to simply do your job well. You’ve just got to make sure you don’t do too much or too little of either.
In this, the first console version of last year’s PC game, you’re placed as the head of a cult just three years from doomsday, The Shrouded Isle is a management sim far darker than most. Everything you do is about appeasing the God Chernobog from under the sea (yes, it’s got a Lovecraftian theme) in time for the end of the world, where presumably, you’ll be held in its tentacley embrace for all of eternity.
To do this, you have to manage five clans, setting them various tasks that facilitate the continuation of the cult’s existence via followers ignorance long enough to get an invite for that apocalyptic afterparty. Each season, you’ll pick an advisor (all procedurally-generated from a sizeable pool of traits) from each of the five clans to carry out the tasks. You can pick only three of the five advisors to do the work each month, and depending on their traits, they’ll either help or hinder the general mood of the cult’s village.
Then, at the end of the season, you must sacrifice one of the advisors to Chernobog. The simple decision would surely be to chuck who you deem worst at their job into the gaping maw of an ancient deity, but while an advisor may have a negative effect in one way, their death may destabilize relations with their family, and ultimately, their clan, and if that happens? Well, you’re gonna be on the wrong end of a lynching. So here you have the tired old cliche of a ‘decide who dies’ choice, but now it isn’t about justice, revenge, or morality. It’s basically so you keep your job and appease the behemoth beneath the waves for another season. The Shrouded Isle‘s heart is dark and uncaring, and that’s what makes it such a deliciously compelling game when it’s at its best.
The spanner in the works is that advisors can have vices, and those vices can affect the overall harmony of the cult if these advisors get delegated a job that contradicts it on any given month. You can either leave them out, possibly upsetting the elder of their clan, or pop them alongside other advisors who can nullify the harm their vices cause. There’s plenty of juggling to do in this respect, and it can be effective or it can do little more to mask an obvious issue than a pack of chewing gum and half a can of body spray does for an employee heading into work the morning after a binge of beer and cigarettes.
Procedural content works best when it has hilarious and/or unexpected results, and there’s a dark humor to some of the situations these traits and vices can bring up. Throw in the occasional suggestions from Chernobog itself to go after certain individuals, and there’s a perverse pleasure in seeing all your good intentions rapidly crumble.
The game’s decision making isn’t the only striking thing about it. The Shrouded Isle‘s monochromatic visual style is simple, yet so very effective. The sickly green-yellow hue feels in keeping with the atmosphere of the game, and it jazzes up the rather majestic menus, text, and map screens you pore over. You will be staring at a lot of text too. The Shrouded Isle is stats and information heavy, which certainly adds to building its randomized cast of characters into something a little more meaningful in a short space of time.
The only real downside to that (unless you’re averse to reading lots of text in games of course) is that in the Switch’s handheld mode, it’s really difficult to make out all the relevant details on such a relatively small screen. For a game that is reliant on you being able to read and understand everything, and on a console that thrives because of its portability, this is a big deal. Yes, you can still read it, but it’s not that easy, and it negates perhaps the best reason to pick the game up on Switch over PC.
The Shrouded Isle also has a longevity issue despite its procedural nature. There’s a bit too much repetition far too soon. There’s still new situations and occurrences, but they begin to feel like a rarified treat after awhile. This is a game that is quite good at masking its limitations otherwise, but this is the one area that the mask gets peeled back.
I fully recommend The Shrouded Isle for anyone wanting an unconventional, horror-led take on the sim management genre. It really does go to some fucked up places if your imagination is willing to back up the writing. The caveat here is that it’s hard to recommend this Switch version if you’re planning on playing it on the go. It’s just about worth persevering with if that is your choice, but it’s an unfortunate oversight nonetheless.
The Shrouded Isle review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher.
The Shrouded Isle is out now on Nintendo Switch and PC.
There’s a forbidding air to the Faroe Islands, an isolated fishing community where No Rest for the Wicked is set. The year is 1862, and Baldur Joensen (Egor Venned) has a quiet, simple life. The young man lives with his religious, conservative, widowed mother Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) in a comfortable cottage, spending his time picnicking with her or fishing with the other men on the island.
But he yearns for something more.
The easy answer is that he wants to go explore the world. Despite being isolated, the islands are frequented by ships that stop for trade, and there are 19th-century equivalent seasonal workers who pass through, which provides Baldur with a glimpse of the outside world that he’s missing out on.
When Baldur rescues Danish man Helge (Pilou Asbæk) after the latter has an accident in the foggy waters, the young man’s life begins to expand. While the two aren’t fluent in the other’s language, they can communicate on a rudimentary level, and Baldur quickly becomes entranced by Helge’s transient stories. To say the other man is more worldly is an understatement. The appeal becomes more significant and complicated when Baldur and Helge begin to act on their mutual attraction, sneaking in bouts of lovemaking under Ásla’s nose.
Obviously this is where the film’s conflict lies, but screenwriter Rasmus Birch’s languid script takes its time, chronicling dinners and late-night talks between the men in order to develop their romance. As the intimacy deepens and Baldur becomes increasingly enamored, he imagines a life for himself away from the islands and his mother.
Ásla inevitably discovers what the men have been up to, but the issue truly comes to a head when Baldur declares his intent to ship off with Helge. Ásla protests, laying the emotional blackmail on thick to the point that her son relents, leaving Helge to go off on his own.
Then a massive storm strikes. And Helge dies. No Rest for the Wicked shifts gears dramatically because the dead man begins to come back to haunt Baldur – continuing their nocturnal dalliances with such intensity that Baldur’s body is left bloody.
No Rest for the Wicked is teased as a vampire narrative, but it is unlike other predatory queer horror texts. Helge’s return is damaging, yes, but it is clear that the intent is romantic; these are men whose love was cut short, and that connection persists after death via supernatural means. Of course, the other islanders don’t react as such when the truth comes out, resulting in some classic visual tropes of the subgenre, albeit with several intriguing subversions.
The film is more than content to take its time, though, which means that the hour and forty-minute runtime can occasionally feel narratively rudderless. When an unexpected development arises in the last act that dramatically affects the other townspeople, it’s genuinely exciting and unusual, but it also makes it clear how intimate and contained the story has been. We barely know these other characters, which makes their fates less involving to audiences.
It’s also challenging to distinguish between several of these men, a fact not helped by cinematographer Jacob Møller’s dim lighting. It’s candlelight romanticism, but there are several points where I was happy that the film was in Faorese because the subtitles helped to identify which character was which.
Writer/director Kasper Kalle has crafted a beautiful and atmospheric supernatural romance that capitalizes on the beauty of the Faroe Islands. Seriously, the scenery is so stunning that large swaths of the movie play like an advertisement for the tourism board. Aside from being gorgeous to look at, the film lives and dies based on the relationship between Baldur and Helge, which is romantic and forbidden in the film’s first half and melancholy and tragic in the back half.
It’s also quite hot, with great chemistry between the innocent, naïve Venned and the more experienced and worldly Asbæk. When Helge returns after the Biblical-level storm, the result is unnerving, sure, but it also feels like the universe correcting a misstep. In this capacity, the film plays like a sweeping historical romance about the lengths that true love will go to persist.
Despite the laggy pacing, due to a strong romantic component and the fascinating complications introduced in the film’s last act, No Rest for the Wicked is an easy recommend for fans of queer horror.
No Rest for the Wicked had its world debut at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.
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