GemCraft - Chasing Shadows

An epic, challenging tower defense game with an emphasis on strategy and replayability. Summon gems of immense magical potency and harness their unique abilities against a seemingly endless horde of monsters. The archdemon seeks to swallow the world, and you must journey to stand against her.

GemCraft - Chasing Shadows is a tower defense, strategy and indie game developed by Game in a Bottle and published by Armor Games Studios.
Released on April 30th 2015 is available in English only on Windows.

It has received 4,065 reviews of which 3,877 were positive and 188 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.2 out of 10. 😍

The game is currently priced at 9.75€ on Steam.

The Steam community has classified GemCraft - Chasing Shadows into these genres:

Tower Defense Strategy Indie Singleplayer Action Top-Down Fantasy Tactical 2D Difficult Classic Great Soundtrack Puzzle Magic Dark Fantasy

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at GemCraft - Chasing Shadows through various videos and screenshots.

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Requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

OS *: Windows Vista SP1
Processor: Intel Celeron N or better
Memory: 2048 MB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics or better
Storage: 100 MB available space

Reviews

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Sept. 2024

Looks, functions, and feels better than the original Flash version. I'm very happy to know there are so many levels and achievements. What I love the most is how you can fine tune your upgrades to fit your play style; the strategies are just endless! (Which allows for some replayability). Overall, a masterpiece of Tower Defense games, and definitely worth every penny.

June 2024

Gemcraft is a great game if you like Tower Defences. If you're unsure if this game would appeal to you, you can find the original Flash version of the previous titles online, and give it a go for yourself. I personally would recommend the Gemcraft series wholeheartedly to Tower Defence fans. This is one of the few games that I loved enough to get 100% completion on.

June 2024

For the past 6 months I have been on a nostalgia-driven quest to find the perfect tower defense game. Many of the games of my childhood either slipped into the digital void when their host websites went offline, or are too filled with predatory micro-transactions and graphics that scream "you got games on your phone?" for me to feel good about playing them. In my quest I've played a dozen indie titles in the genre, but GemCraft achieves all I could want in a tower defense game and more, and I feel comfortable labeling it as the pinnacle of the traditional approach to the genre. Broadly, GemCraft is a strategy game with a simple premise - monsters approach your orb and you build towers to stop them. Every single game mechanic is built on this idea harmoniously and with no superfluous gimmicks. The sheer magnitude of systems and abilities that are drip-fed across the expansive selection of maps is only matched by the depth of each mechanic, so I can understand this being a 100+ hour game if gathering all achievements and min/maxing each map is one's initiative. Additionally, the modular difficulty system allows extremely fine tuning of the game's challenge while introducing higher and higher reward quality at each difficulty level. With the challenge bumped up high, it's easy to become lost in the optimization puzzle that comes from setting up your little pieces and evaluating how well they protect your precious orb. The gem system itself is a whole feat of game design that deserves praise as well. It presents itself so simply - this gem does this kind of damage, this gem does a different kind of damage, this gem is upgraded etc. but the real fun is in combining different gems and optimizing their placement in towers and traps for maximum efficiency. There's too much detail in the way the gems are designed and balanced to cover in this review, but I wanted to mention how genius the system is for producing interesting and surprising interactions in the strategy setting. Where GemCraft succeeds and other, modern spins on the genre fail, is that it remains so faithful to its core identity. While it rode the end of the wave of the tower defense genre's broad popularity, it channeled the strongest inspiration from the successes of those early flash/mobile games and learned the most lessons from their failures. A big trend that I see in indie games right now is "what if X genre, but Y genre?" which produces some interesting novelties, but rarely a strong hit. What I love about GemCraft is that it is proudly and earnestly a tower defense game. No gimmicks, no micro-transactions, no ads, just an incredibly rich game which knows its roots and succeeds in expanding the formula to its highest potential.

March 2024

Still holds up in 2024! Very easy to get into, lots of things you can do and learn that gives the game a very high skill ceiling.

Feb. 2024

One of the most in-depth Tower Defense titles available on steam. It's only single player, but it provides myriad ways to approach its many levels and challenges. It will also run on a toaster, which is a bonus.

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