Shadows have long attracted the musings of curious people, their poetic duality generating wonderful works of art in their honor. Shady Part of Me, a game about this inescapable balance, reveals in playful greyscale the mesmerizing effects of jumping back and forth between realms of light and darkness.
Developer Douze Dixiemes has created in Shady Part of Me an innovative and evocative puzzle-platformer that has the player separately control the body and shadow of a little girl through interlocking puzzles of light and shadow. Shady Part of Me retails at $14.99 USD for the PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Playstation 4 and packs in about 4 to 5 hours worth of engaging content.
Atmospheric Brilliance
From the first scene, Shady Part of Me jumps off the screen with its unique style–a dream-like expanse of masterful drawings, all set to an out-of-this-world original soundtrack. There’s a beautiful restraint with the UI, only opting to focus on the little girl’s playful but ominous narration manifest as text across the world. There’s no mini-map, no progression markers, nothing distracting on the screen away from the powerful artistic ambiance.
Few games instantly charm like Shady Part of Me does, and in that company it shares with platformer classics like Ori and the Blind Forest, Limbo, Braid or even more artistic adventure games like Journey. Each of these gems are polished to the point of near-perfection where, most importantly, their top-notch aesthetics meld with innovative mechanics.
A game made better by the symbiosis of its art and gameplay can only go wrong in places like the main story, but rest assured, Shady Part of Me is no let-down there. Vague enough to keep you guessing and drip-fed at just the right rate, the execution of short-form storytelling here is spot-on.
Reorienting Puzzles
At the core of every great platformer is foundational learning theory: Introduce → Reinforce → Complicate → Reorient. Puzzle mechanics start out easy in low-stakes environments, then they are fully defined by a further challenge. Then, the puzzle demands absolute knowledge and mastery of the mechanic in a high-stakes environment, and once completed that new mechanic reorients the player’s mastery for the rest of the puzzles to come. Shady Part of Me expertly scaffolds its varying degrees of difficulty.
Beyond its solid fundamentals, Shady Part of Me proves bold and imaginative. Other platformers in the past like Limbo or Contrast have played around with light and shadow as defining game mechanics, but Shady Part of Me does so with an impressive finesse. Shady Part of Me isn’t an innovative puzzle masterpiece like Portal or Braid because it doesn’t go all out on its zany creativity, but it plays to its strengths with restraint in the puzzle department to let other elements like story and atmosphere get their shine in this short experience.
Conclusion
Shady Part of Me is the definition of short and sweet–its story wraps up well, the puzzles reach a satisfying level of complexity, and the simplicity of the core game loop never gets too old. In a world full of indie platformers and puzzle games, Shady Part of Me stands out among the best of them with its expertly-blended story and mechanics and stunning artistic polish.
Score: 10/10
Check Out the Shady Part of Me Accolades Trailer:
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Steam Review
Recent Michigan State University grad and current Game Studies researcher who plays fantasy RPG's to escape, Smash to compete, and Stardew to chill. Also have a +1 to rage/toxicity resistance due to the many hours sunk into WoW, R6, and LoL.
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