Shady Part of Me Review: Beautiful and Familiar

Puzzle platformers seem to play well with emotional catharsis. Maybe it’s how they tie traveling, climbing, and jumping to their metaphoric echoes of the human psychological experience. It’s the kind of sub-genre that blew the doors wide open with Limbo and Braid, teasing players with comforting bedrock game mechanics towards unfamiliar ends. That’s what Shady Part of Me, from developer Douze Dixièmes, is shooting for, and it’s remarkably successful in spite of its oft-traveled territory.

Shady Part of Me is not a mold-breaking exercise. Players take on the role of a cryptic young girl escaping what seems to be an asylum, carrying her shadow in tow as an imaginary friend or psychological manifestation. The unnamed protagonist navigates through surreal, often industrially themed environments while her shadow follows alongside her, trapped in the lit edges of the shadowlands on walls and floors. The two assist each other past obstacles and brief puzzles along the way, slowly nudging into a friendship, often conversing in abstract dialogue that references therapeutic progress and tenacity as tools to resolve general insecurity and possibly even an unspecific trauma.

There’s a really fetching aesthetic in Shady Part of Me which blossoms whenever the game jumps into busy motion. Every section – described as “sessions,” implying an incredibly obvious theme of psychotherapy – is awash in animated cross-hatched shifting shadows and detailed architecture that make the world seem like an animated watercolor graphic novel. Helping the emotional tenor is an outstanding soundtrack, a kind of moody dark jazz concept with occasional female vocals that begs for a discrete release alongside the game. Of special note is how the soundtrack matches with each area of the game, slowly building up so that later section tracks sound fuller and more exciting.

The shadow-play at Shady Part of Me’s center has been explored in games such as Lost in Shadow for the Wii, and the central protagonist looks quite similar to the underwater test subjects in Inside (or, for that matter, The Ring’s Sadako). All the same, how the game shapes around the interchange between the two characters, with movable boxes bending lamps which change how the shadow girl navigates the terrain, is smooth, thoughtful, and sharply responsive on controller. How familiar these mechanics immediately seem soon takes a back seat to the thorough care that’s been granted to how they work. There’s a nicely tactile feel to movement in both the 2D and 3D portions of gameplay, and some gravity-warping mechanics which emerge later on in the game further emphasize this level of quality.

Voice acting for the central protagonist and her shadow is handled by a name which should be immediately familiar; Hannah Murray played Cassie on Skins and Gilly in Game of Thrones, though her voice here sounds notably different from those two television hallmarks. A third male character voice in the mix is also excellent, although it’s noticeably difficult to piece together the grander story from the slow drip of rendered dialogue. Collectible origami birds add light ingredients to the script as well, with many deftly hidden in each level.

Aside from a few late-game puzzles which are unexpectedly difficult (though never truly unfair), the challenge level of the game is consistently breezy. Shady Part of Me’s checkpointed sections tend to be short, and each protagonist needs to reach a swirling ring before the next section can be unlocked. Some of the most inventive puzzles include situations where shadows must be moved around with lamps and devices to carry a character across dangers, and all of it is guided by consistently strong art direction and an excellent camera.

While the game can be completed in only one or two sittings, the origami gameplay feature make it worthwhile to return at least once. If Shady Part of Me’s narrative was a little less vague, the story would probably have greater stakes than are evident. None of that compromises the high standards of design and the entertaining challenge of the game itself, though, and the visual diversity of each act ensures that the black-and-white aesthetic never seems the least bit drab. Shady Part of Me is a worthy atmospheric winter puzzler, and we’re definitely looking forward to the next game to release from this studio.

Shady Part of Me releases on December 10 on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.

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