Summary
The shrouded isle is a video game developed by Kitfox Games. The player plays the perspective of the high priest, in charge of running an occult commune. The game picks up five years before the apocalyptic return of their god, Chernobog. The community will only be spared if it is free of sin; it is your job to root out and sacrifice the sinners. Each turn is one season, and the game lasts for 20 seasons (five years). In addition to sacrificing all sinners, there are five stats that the player has to manage each turn: ignorance, fervor, discipline, penitence, and obedience. Each of these stats can either be increased or decreased by an action, and if one stat drops too low for too long, the the game is over. If you can make it to the end, you win if there are no sinners and all stats are good.
Families, virtues, vices, and inquiries
There are five major families, and each one is in charge of one stat. House Keggni is in charge of ignorance; Iosefka is in charge of fervor; Cadwell is in charge of discipline; Efferson is in charge of penitence, and Blackborn is in charge of obedience.
Each family has a list of villagers. Each villager has a virtue and a vice. The virtues and vices can be minor, moderate, and major. Each vice detracts from a stat, and each virtue buffs a stat. Some virtues and vices will be revealed to you straight away, but most all virtues and vices are unknown need to be discovered through inquiry.
Depending on the loyalty of the family, you may get zero, one, or two inquiries (depending on if the family is satisfied, dissatisfied, or zealous). You may spend these inquiries on any given villager to discover their vice or virtue. Each unknown virtue or vice requires two inquiries to discover; one inquiry will tell you what type of stat it corresponds to (ignorance, fervor, etc), and the second inquiry will tell you if it is a minor, moderate, or major vice.
Advisors, sacrifices, and loyalty
In order to use a villager to increase a stat, you need to appoint them as an advisor. You get to select on advisor per house per turn. Once you select all advisors and finish inquiries, you may start the season. Once the season begins, you get to select a stat to increase. You simply choose an advisor to use; choose the advisor of Keggni to increase ignorance, or Iosefka to increase fervor, etcetera. HOWEVER -- their vice will make another stat go downward. If their vice is minor, it will be negligable in contrast to the buff of their house; however, if they have a major vice, the detriment is HUGE. For example, if the villager is an "artist" and you use them as an advisor, the ignorance stat will tank. You can select multiple advisors per turn if desired, but it will split the benefit between them.
After three advisor uses, the season ends and you have to sacrifice one of the advisors. You can only choose a sacrifice from among the advisors; therefore, you want to always have one character with a major vice among your advisors. The family of the sacrifice will lose loyalty, but the amount of loyalty they lose depends on the degree of their vice. Sacrifices will also change your stats; if their major vice is in ignorance, it will greatly raise your ignorance, and so forth.
Every time you use an advisor, it increases that family's loyalty, but decreases the loyalty of all other families. Each family can be either rebellious, dissatisfied, neutral, satisfied, or zealous. If a family is rebellious at the beginning of a season, you must increase their loyalty to at minimum dissatisfied by the end of a season. Sometimes this can look like using an advisor even when you desperately need other stats, to keep the family from rebellion.
If you kill off the last member of a family, rebellion is no longer an issue. However, you will no longer have the option to select them as an advisor; therefore, you will have to change that family's stat using the other advisors' virtues.
Spiritual contagions and purification
After the first year, you will start to encounter villagers whose virtue is replaced with a note that says that they "act strangely". You can use inquiry to discover what their spiritual contagion is, or you can take a season to examine them. In order to examine them, you need to confine them in "the tower". Four villagers can be confined at a time, and you can either examine or purify them over a season. Examination will reveal their contagion, purification will cure it and replace it with a virtue. It takes an entire season to purify a villager, and contagions can spread, which is why it's vital that you purify the villagers expediently; therefore, I always use inquiries to discover contagions, so that I do not have to spend a season examining them.
Purifying villagers has a chance of killing them.
If you purify a villager enough times, they become "awoken". Their little face icon will have tentacles, their little callouts will be gibberish, and they don't work well as advisors (as far as I'm aware). If you can get the entire village to be "awoken" by the end of the game, you will get a special ending. I cheated and looked the ending up on youtube instead of grinding for it, because I knew it would take me like 100 or more hours to pull off.
Miscellany
There are small events; every couple of seasons you will have a little event happen, in which a villager will come to you for wisdom or help and you will be able to respond in a few different ways in order to buff a certain stat or increase loyalty. It's just a little bonus.
Additionally, when you click on or select a villager, there will be a little callout above their portrait. The callout reveals the villager's virtue; each quip corresponds to a specific virtue. There's a list of them posted online. I haven't referred to it, but I'm just asserting it here for posterity sake.
Personal impressions
I love the game, but I don't have the patience to get all 9 endings. I have gotten two; the good ending, and the ending where I fail in penitence toward the end of the game. The game is extremely atmospheric and very aesthetically pleasing. I am curious about the other stats' endings, but I don't know if I'll get around to them quite yet; getting them sounds very time-consuming.
It's on Steam and Itch.io. If I recall correctly it's moderately cheap, and it goes on sale from time to time on Steam too.