Aragami is a stealth game in the classic sense: sneaking around with a character that has very slight combat skill, but does have some choice tools for staying undetected. In this case, the tools are shadow-based powers, as well as some traditional ninja tools

The game starts with your player character summoned through some dark ritual as a spirit of vengeance. Soon after, you are introduced to the first two (fundamental) powers: the ability to teleport to any shadow within range; and the ability to "paint" an area in temporary shadow, for use with the previous warping power. These powers are funded by a "mana" gauge on your character's back (nice touch), which automatically refills in when in shadow, but also empties when in light. There's also a third "twilight" zone that does neither. The light system also (naturally) affects your detect-ability by patrols, so you're highly incentivised to blink from shadow to shadow across an area, timing blinks to avoid guards' sight-lines.

There's also your trusty sword you can use to stab a guard from behind, or quickly silence one that's found you. Finding scrolls in each level lets you unlock (and upgrade) some helpful stealthy abilities, grouped into defensive, aggressive, and passive techniques. Passives are things like hiding bodies with shadow; ledge & ceiling kill abilities; and marking the location of collectibles. These abilities cost nothing except time, and i found were almost always useful. Defensive abilities include seeing enemies through walls, dropping decoys, and temporary invisibility. For the aggressive we have kunai to kill from range; an area blind; and a shadow trap to remove guards from this world. Defensive and aggressive powers don't use your shadow meter, but are on a usage system (two uses for most, if not all). It's kind of weird to have a separate resource for this, but it feels like a way to limit over-reliance - otherwise we could just infinite kunai everything, i guess..

Story-wise, as said before we've been summoned to wreak bloody vengeance on the invading forces of light. It seems to be a young girl who's brought you into being, and she tasks you with freeing the imprisoned empress as your primary goal. The game follows a mission structure, with a different narrative objective each time, but mechanically boils down to "get from point A to B" - the environments you travel through are nice to look at though, and the game has a good overall art-style. You get a mission rating at the end, and bonus emblems for being undetected; killing all enemies; and killing no-one. Over the course of these missions, you slowly find out more about the history of this land, and the main players involved - a decent tale of heroes and revenge, but nothing world-shaking

The DLC campaign, Nightfall, was an interesting one. To start, i was a bit tired of the gameplay by the end of the main campaign, so i came into this with a less-than-receptive attitude. To counteract this, i could clearly see that the devs were conscious of this tiredness, because Nightfall shakes up the mission structure a fair bit. It's still generally A to B, but instead of blindly following a mission marker, they'll have you search an area for intel first, or tail a messenger through village streets. This adjustment, combined with the fact that all shadow powers are unlocked at the start, made the game's objectives feel a little more open to my own planning and experimentation. The entire DLC campaign can be played in co-op as well, for extra stealthy shenanigans

Overall, a decent stealth game, if a little bit too traditional to really transform the genre. Shadow-blinking does feel real good though...