Shady Part of Me

Most puzzle games hand you one avatar and one rulebook. Shady Part of Me hands you two of each, and then makes them mutually exclusive.

You play a young girl who exists in three dimensions and cannot touch light — a sunbeam is instant death. You also play her shadow, who lives flattened against the walls of the world in two dimensions and can only walk where light actually falls. Remove the light and the shadow ceases to exist. Add the light and the girl burns. Neither one can finish a room alone. That is the entire game, and it’s a better premise than most studios get in a decade.

It comes from Douze Dixièmes, published by Focus Entertainment on December 10, 2020. That pedigree matters. Focus has spent years as the patron saint of mid-budget European games that punch above their production values — A Plague Tale, GreedFall, Vampyr — and Shady fits that lineage precisely: a modest scope executed with unusual care, sold at a price that doesn’t demand a masterpiece.

Its market position in late 2020 was crowded. This was the post-Limbo, post-Inside, post-Gris era, where “melancholy indie platformer with a mental-health metaphor and a hand-painted look” had calcified into an entire aisle at the store. Shady Part of Me has to survive in that aisle. It does, and the reason is the shadow/light duality: a real mechanical invention, not a mood board with jumping attached. The genre’s best trick is turning a thematic idea into a rule you have to obey with your hands. This game does that early.

• Dual-plane control: One button swaps you between a 3D girl and her 2D shadow. They occupy the same world but obey opposite physics, and puzzles routinely require you to switch mid-solution — the girl pushes a crate that the shadow then walks across as a platform.
• Light as level geometry: Lamps, doors, spotlights and moving objects aren’t set dressing. Reposition a light and you’re literally redrawing the shadow’s traversable surfaces while simultaneously deciding where the girl can and cannot stand.
• Frictionless rewind and checkpointing: A dedicated rewind lets you unwind mistakes freely, and checkpoints are placed with real generosity. The game refuses to punish you for thinking out loud.
• Hannah Murray narration: The Game of Thrones and Skins actor voices both halves of the pair, and their running argument doubles as the story’s entire delivery system.
• Watercolor art direction: Hand-painted dreamscapes moving from toy rooms through forests into abstract voids, scored by a deliberately restrained ambient soundtrack.
• Dozens of hidden origami birds: A collectible hunt that substantially extends the runtime for completionists.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is: read the room, identify which half of you is blocked, work out what the other half has to change, execute, swap, repeat. It sounds simple written down. In practice it demands a mental gymnastic that almost no other puzzle game asks for — you have to hold a 3D space and its 2D projection in your head at the same time, and understand that moving an object in one is a structural edit to the other.

The best puzzles here are strong. A crate the girl shoves three feet to the left becomes a ledge the shadow can climb; nudge it another foot and the ledge becomes a wall. The moment where this clicks — where you stop seeing “a box” and start seeing “a box and the silhouette it casts, which are two different tools” — is the game’s whole argument for existing. Douze Dixièmes teach it without a tutorial pop-up, which deserves credit.

The problem is what comes after the click. The vocabulary stops expanding around the halfway mark. Once you’ve internalized the projection rule, a large share of the remaining puzzles resolve into the same two verbs: push the box, pull the lever. The game keeps finding new arrangements for those verbs, and the arrangements are competent, but by the later chapters you’re often executing a solution you identified thirty seconds ago rather than solving anything. For a game built on a mechanic this fresh, the back half is conspicuously short on new ideas.

There’s a second, sharper issue: a handful of late mechanics arrive without explanation. After teaching its rules through pure environmental design for most of the game, it introduces systems in its final stretch that you have to reverse-engineer by dying. That’s not difficulty, that’s an onboarding failure, and it’s especially jarring in a game that was otherwise so patient.

Friction, and the Absence of It

Here’s where Shady is smarter than its peers. The rewind is not a mercy feature bolted on for accessibility optics — it’s a design thesis. Puzzle games are built on hypothesis testing, and every second spent re-walking a corridor after a failed hypothesis is dead time that discourages the next experiment. By making failure cost nothing but a button hold, Douze Dixièmes remove the tax on curiosity. You try more things. You try dumber things, which is how you find the good ones.

Combine that with the checkpoint density and the result is a puzzle game with near-zero execution burden. There are no precision jumps to fumble, no timing windows to eat your evening. If you know the answer, you will produce the answer. That’s the correct call for this design, and it makes the game approachable for people who bounced off Braid or The Witness.

The cost is that difficulty never spikes. Veterans of the genre should expect a comfortable stroll with maybe a handful of rooms that require a real sit-down think.

The Story Problem

The narrative frames the puzzles as an argument between a frightened girl and the harder, colder part of herself — the shadow needling her toward action, the girl flinching from it. Murray’s performance is the best thing in the script. Her line readings do real work, giving the shadow a dry impatience that never tips into cartoon villainy.

But the writing underneath her is thinner than the delivery. The game’s treatment of trauma and self-acceptance is legible to the point of being pre-chewed — it explains its own metaphor, out loud, more than once, to an audience that understood it the moment a shadow started talking back. Where Inside trusted silence and Gris trusted imagery, Shady keeps narrating. The character work also wobbles in the final chapters, where the two voices drift toward the resolution the theme requires rather than the one they’ve earned.

None of this sinks it. The story is a serviceable frame that gives the puzzles emotional stakes. But the game’s ideas live in its hands, not its mouth.

The art is the reason this game gets remembered. The hand-painted watercolor treatment — soft-edged, desaturated, deliberately unfinished at the margins — gives the dreamscape a texture that stylized flat-vector indies never achieve. Toy rooms bleed into forests bleed into abstract voids without tonal whiplash, which is a serious achievement in art direction discipline.

More importantly, the aesthetic is legible. That’s the hard part in a game where light and shadow are load-bearing rules. The palette stays quiet enough that an active light source reads instantly, and the shadow silhouette never gets lost against a busy background. Beautiful art that obscures the puzzle is a failure; this is beautiful art that clarifies it.

The soundtrack is restrained to the point of near-absence for long stretches, which is the right instinct. Ambient pads, sparse piano, and a lot of room tone. It gives Murray’s narration space to breathe and keeps the game from feeling scored-at.

Technically it’s undemanding by design — a stylized, geometrically simple game with no combat and no crowds is light on hardware. The UI is built around minimal contextual prompts, designed to stay out of the frame.

Steam is the definitive version if you have a controller plugged in. Mouse-and-keyboard works, but this is a game of analog nudges — inching a box to exactly the right offset so the projected silhouette lines up — and a stick is simply better at that than WASD’s binary inputs. The PC version also gives you the resolution headroom the watercolor art actually deserves; that texture work benefits from pixels in a way that most stylized indies don’t.

Nintendo Switch is the better fit, and the weaker hardware can host the better experience here. A short, checkpoint-heavy, execution-light puzzle game is close to a perfect handheld object. The rewind means you can put the console to sleep mid-thought and lose nothing. The muted palette and soft edges hide the resolution drop far more gracefully than a high-contrast, detail-dense game would — watercolor is forgiving of a handheld screen in a way sharp vector art is not.

The tradeoff is real, though: some of the finer shadow-alignment work is harder to read on a small display, and the depth cues that let you judge the girl’s 3D position benefit from a big panel. Dock it for the fiddly rooms, undock it for everything else.

Shady Part of Me is what happens when a small studio has one good idea and the discipline to build a whole game around it instead of diluting it. The girl-and-shadow duality is a rule system, not a gimmick layered onto a platformer, and it generates puzzles no other game can; for its opening stretch it’s a pleasure to learn.

It doesn’t sustain that. The second half repeats itself, the script says out loud what the mechanics already said better, and the ending arrives before the design has fully explored its own space. Those are real flaws.

Still, the price is right, the runtime is honest about what it has to offer, and the thing it does well — that specific moment where you stop seeing objects and start seeing objects and their projections — is worth the ticket. Douze Dixièmes made something that couldn’t be anything else. We recommend it to players who want ideas over difficulty, with the caveat that it won’t test them.