Blood & Shadow (Nolimit City) Slot Demo & Review

It only occurred to me as I was finishing up this review, but this machine is most likely intended as a sequel to Nolimit’s previous game, Book of Shadows! Both games share a similar art style, and there’s even a duplicate symbol on the paytable, so the two games are definitely related in some way. It’s impressive to see how Nolimit City manages to blend their trademark mature themes with this almost cartoonish graphical style – they did it before with The Rave slot, but I think this game does it even better. Still, we are discussing an online slot – it doesn’t matter how nice it looks if the payouts are bad!

On that note, let’s check out the paytable; the Yellow Female Character is the highest paying symbol and offers a payout of 8x the total bet for a full payway of five of a kind. The Six-Eyed Werewolf is in second place at 6x for all five symbols, quickly followed by the Three-Eyed Sheep at 5x for a complete payway. The final two high-paying spots include a Green Dragon worth 4x, and a Blue Skull pays 3x for a five-of-a-kind combination! The paytable also has two more levels – there are five medium pays with returns ranging between 0.9x and 1.5x and five more low pays at 0.1x to 0.4x.

As for the betting range, the minimum wager of €0.20 per spin is going to be perfect for the low-roller crowd, whilst the upper limit of €280 is probably far more than anybody is ever going to need. Thankfully, a good range of intermediate bets is available between the two extremes.

Nolimit’s Blood and Shadows slot utilises a five-reel, four-row playfield for a total of 1,024 active payways. This is a tumbling reels game, meaning winning combinations are immediately removed from the reels to allow new symbols to fall in. When this occurs, several wins can occur from a single paid spin.

Ritual Bar

There are five levels of progression on the ritual bar, which resets after each level-up. You’ll need to hit winning combinations of medium or high-paying symbols to fill the bar – a medium-paying symbol adds one point, whilst a high-paying symbol adds three. Scatter symbols also fill the bar with ten additional points. Progressing through the levels will remove low-paying symbols from the reels and also convert medium pays into high ones.

Candle Spins

Whenever you reach a new level on the ritual bar, two candle spins will be awarded. Once you reach level four, this increases to six spins.

Sticky Wilds

Sticky wild symbols are included on reels two, three, four, and five. During candle/cursed spins, the wilds will drop to the bottom of their reel and remain in stacks until they form part of a winning combination.

There are two ways to trigger the main cursed spins bonus round – you can hit three or more scatters or reach level four on the ritual bar. There’s also a ‘Baphomet Rite’ option in the bonus buy menu, which can make this dramatically easier to achieve.

Baphomet Rite

Purchasing this feature from the bonus buy menu will instantly progress the ritual bar to the third level and award six candle spins. This means that you only need to reach one further level to trigger the main cursed spins bonus round.

Cursed Spins

In this mode, the ritual bar is removed from play, and the playfield is extended to a 5×5 configuration with 3,125 payways. Triggering the Cursed Spins via the ritual bar will award six spins, whilst a scatter-based trigger will get you ten spins instead. You’ll also receive one additional free spin for every scatter symbol that lands whilst the feature is active.

Bonus Buy

All of Nolimit City’s games include a bunch of bonus buy options, and Blood & Shadows is no exception! The ‘Baphomet Rite’ – see above – costs 66x the normal price per spin, but the Cursed Spins cost a whopping 500x, suggesting that this feature will be extremely hard to hit during regular play. You can also opt for a lucky draw between both options if you wish.