Tandem: A Tale of Shadows (PS4)
Tandem: A Tale of Shadows is a top-down puzzler where Emma must navigate her way through puzzles, but it is also a side-scrolling platformer where the teddy bear Fenton must safely navigate his way to a crystal at the end of a level. Never will these two cross over or directly interact, but as Fenton walks on the walls of the same spaces Emma walks through, the shadows and switches they utilize help each other work their way through the Kane family mansion.
Emma and Fenton end up working together as they both desire to learn the truth behind the disappearance of a young boy named Thomas Kane. While the intellectual curiosity of the ten-year old girl is what spurs her to investigate the mansion of the illusionist family, Fenton is actually the teddy bear that once belonged to Thomas, but while he can’t speak or express himself, Emma unfortunately can. Emma’s voice actress puts in a very poor performance, her lines layered over the few scenes she speaks rather sloppily as she speeds through sentences in scenes that already feel unusually fast where she struggles to express the appropriate emotions. Her observations are mostly unimportant though, the game progressing through its five worlds and over 40 individual levels without really touching on the core mystery save for tiny secret rooms you can find that don’t illuminate much. The final stage wraps things up rather suddenly too so it’s likely best to think of Thomas Kane’s mysterious fate as a motivation for the journey rather than a compelling question that needs answering, and because there are so few check-ins on how things are barely progressing, Tandem: A Tale of Shadows is likely better thought of purely as a puzzle game.
The game’s shadow mechanic is definitely what aims to set it apart from other games in the genre. Each level will be navigated both by Emma and Fenton, the player able to swap between them with a button press although Fenton will need to be on solid ground to do so. While Emma’s top-down navigation is only limited by conventional obstacles, the vividly detailed spaces she explores have a strong impact on the black and white spaces Fenton travels through. Walls in Emma’s world become the ground he stands on, but more importantly, strong shadows also become solid surfaces he can walk across, meaning a good deal of puzzles involve Emma needing to set up a space properly so a lantern she carries or some other light source can properly form flooring for the teddy bear.
Messing around with shadows will be the most common way the two protagonists impact each other, but Emma does eventually begin to encounter new ideas like deadly bugs that follow light or living cubes that like to move out of place if not properly contained. Fenton has a few ways of aiding Emma while exploring too. Mostly this will be by stepping on switches that open doors or activating pumps to move around oil that a monster likes to inhabit, but his movement is more important since he’s the one who finishes the level and his path is most often blocked by something that requires a little figuring out to overcome.
Tandem: A Tale of Shadows isn’t without ideas to add some extra layers to the problem solving and there are even a few “boss” levels that chain together longer sequences of actions, but at the same time, complexity is not often the greatest factor. Most puzzles tend to restrict themselves to a small space and there won’t be too many things to interact with. Ideas like the oven timers Fenton jumps across that briefly disable fires so Emma can pass through safely are nifty, but there often isn’t too much to an interaction to really make you stop and wonder what you’re meant to be doing. It can feel at times like an area that stumps you will be one where maybe you couldn’t see a hole in the wall Emma can pass through due to the perspective for her exploration or maybe you’ll just be fiddling with getting the light angles right for navigable shadows. There are definitely moments that require some work to overcome, but even with timing often being a consideration in later puzzles it also starts to feel a bit more like simple to execute actions are as often a barrier as needing to figuring out how to arrange things properly to continue.
The puzzle design feels like it can’t quite figure out how to take its core concept beyond the fundamentals. There are definitely a lot of technically different things Emma will be moving around or interacting with, but putting things in place and then crossing them with Fenton doesn’t really shift away from the basics you were managing in the early game. You have to be quicker to avoid missing windows of opportunity or sometimes Emma has something like a spider that will attack her if you don’t have Fenton standing in the right spot to invalidate the danger, but it seems because Fenton always needs to be physically near the space Emma is operating in to contribute, he’s often mostly just crossing the things she sets up or toggling switches. Emma’s personal puzzles relate a bit too much to giving him room to move and likely miss their chance to be more advanced for it, but because there is at least a range of gimmicks on how shadows can be manipulated, you do still have learning periods and new obstacles to keep you occupied. It can at times feel like the kinds of puzzles found in action games though, more about giving you room to move your characters rather than asking you to stop and think about how variables relate to each other deeper than their value in making platforms or opening doors.
THE VERDICT: Tandem: A Tale of Shadows makes an effort to keep evolving its puzzle solving but it can’t escape the shadow of its core mechanic. Emma and Fenton’s activities are too closely linked for them to reach the level of complexity where you need to really stop and consider your actions, and while making some actions time sensitive can make things feel more involved, it doesn’t invigorate the experience enough where platforming challenges can serve as a stand-in for riveting puzzles. The shape of the puzzles you face will change and new gimmicks are introduced so the game isn’t exactly repetitive, but rarely will you face a standout situation that demanded deep contemplation to overcome.
And so, I give Tandem: A Tale of Shadows for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. While the top-down perspective of Emma’s play sometimes masks important details, for the most part Tandem: A Tale of Shadows unfolds as intended even if it’s not quite as captivating as the designers hoped. The responsiveness of the shadow manipulation and how it shapes Fenton’s platforming options is a fascinating concept at first but the game struggles to think of new directions for it. Emma gets plenty of new ideas in her space like the living cubes and deadly bugs, but they don’t move things in a new direction so much as require an additional action or restrict certain options. Limited variables in a situation is likely why Tandem: A Tale of Shadows’s puzzles feel like they only tease your brain on a basic level, the player not given much to consider so they reach the right idea rather quickly. It is quick and clean problem solving most of time though and the little bursts of action where you have to keep the characters moving to survive help keep things lively at least. You aren’t stopping to consider puzzles long very often so you don’t really notice how shallow some of them are, but because there is at least a consistent newness as you clear the small stages, you are distracted some from how so often things boil down to just giving Fenton more ground to move around on.
Tandem: A Tale of Shadows has its moments, but it can often feel like you’re playing the levels that are meant to acclimate you to mechanics and concepts without ever really reaching the ones where they come together in advanced ways that truly test your understanding of them. By the time you’ve come to grips with them you’ll move onto a new part of the mansion with new ideas, only the shadows really there as a consistent idea and they can’t evolve too much when they’re so reliant on the gimmicks Emma too quickly moves along from. A good game could grow out of the ideas featured here but they’re not used cleverly enough to work as more than mildly entertaining interactions between two simple styles of play.