Shadows: Awakening is a game that's going to be compared with a lot of other ARPGs in its field, but it sets itself aside through it's pseudo-party based combat, puzzle scenarios, and a "less-loot" focus that aids with controller play.

"Pseudo-party based combat"-- Instead of dedicating yourself to one character like in conventional ARPGs, you play as a demon in a shadow world that can form a party with three other "puppet" characters that function in a light world. There's more lore and interaction with these characters than in say, Diablo or Torchlight, which are games that are more combat focused. The combat abilities of all characters aren't very complex or customizable (3 tiers of simple stat upgrades).

"Puzzle/platforming scenarios"-- There are actual puzzles that you have to solve, but it a lot of them become formulaic and overdone. Most of the puzzle gameplay is either moving boulders onto switches which is absolutely painful or some sort of pattern matching between shadow/light locations.

"Less-loot focus"-- This game doesn't exactly focus on dropping rainbows and rainbows of loot or loadsamoney for your party to collect-- loot is relatively scarce in comparison to other games. What this means is you'll be spending less time in menus flipping through equipment stats,

This game does have some flaws in its design (poor teleporter placement = backtracking, redundant puzzles, inferior combat gameplay), but its accessibility and moderately-fleshed-out story/characters provide a pretty fun experience. It's a shame Shadows: Awakening has gone relatively unnoticed and the overdone game-title words certainly doesn't help .

I ended up binging this game in ~20 hours. I didn't replay for different puppets, but that is an option. I exclusively used a controller to play the game. Won this game in a steam group giveaway contest, but I assume it's from the recent Humble Bundle Choice October 2020. This game was good, but not "$40 good".