Shady Part of Me

Shady Part of Me is a puzzle-platformer built around one central idea: a little girl and her shadow are two halves of the same person, and you control both. The girl exists in the physical world, bound by gravity and solid ground. Her shadow lives on the walls and floors, moving across surfaces wherever light falls. Solving each stage means toggling between them, using one to open paths for the other, repositioning light sources to stretch or redirect the shadow across impossible gaps. The mechanic sounds simple in a sentence, but Douze Dixièmes pulls real emotional weight from it, because the puzzle logic and the story logic are the same logic. Separation, projection, the parts of yourself you only see at an angle. The art direction deserves its own paragraph. Almost everything is rendered in deep blacks, whites, and muted greys, with occasional washes of pale color that land harder because of the restraint around them. Stages are set in places that feel half-remembered: a hospital corridor, a snow-covered courtyard, a crumbling theatre. There is a handcrafted stillness to each environment that you do not often find in games this mechanically polished. The camera pulls back at key moments to frame both characters in the same shot, and those compositions are genuinely striking. Somebody cared deeply about every pixel of negative space here. Hannah Murray's narration is the other load-bearing wall. She voices a young woman writing letters to her childhood self, working through something the game lets you piece together slowly. Her delivery is soft and precise, never performing sadness, just holding it. The script earns its more lyrical moments because it earns the quiet ones first. The soundtrack matches: spare piano, ambient texture, nothing that crowds the silence. If you play this with headphones in a dim room, the atmosphere does something to you that is hard to shake off quickly. Where the game has limits, they are mostly mechanical. The puzzles are thoughtful but rarely difficult. Veterans of puzzle-platformers will move through most stages without much friction, and a few of the later sequences feel like they exist to extend the runtime rather than deepen the design. The experience clocks in around four to six hours depending on pace, and honestly that length is correct for what it is trying to do. A longer game would have diluted it. The handful of collectible origami pieces scattered through levels add mild replay incentive but feel like a studio obligation rather than an organic part of the world. This is a game for people who finished Gris or A Memoir Blue and immediately went looking for more. It is for players who will pause mid-level not because they are stuck but because the light just caught the geometry in a way that looked like something. It is for anyone who has ever felt that the harder and softer versions of themselves were not quite speaking to each other. It is also, underneath all that mood, a genuinely well-constructed puzzle game that respects your intelligence while keeping its emotional door open the whole time. Shady Part of Me knows exactly what it is, knows when to end, and sticks the landing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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