Tandem: A Tale of Shadows from Monochrome is a cleverly designed game that puzzle-loving gamers will enjoy. The range of difficulty helps to sell this, as does the level design and characters you confront in the game. If you don’t like puzzle games, then this probably won’t bring you into the genre.
Puzzle games can be a hard sell some days. The main reason? There are three types of puzzle games: Too easy, just right, and frustrating as hell. If the puzzle game is too easy, you’re not intellectually stimulated, and you might feel like you’ve wasted your time and money. If it’s too frustrating, then you’re not going to return to it unless your name is Alex Tudor and you enjoy torturous games. If it’s just right, hitting that sweet spot with challenging and gratifying puzzles, then you’re in the best type of puzzle game.
On that note, welcome to Tandem: A Tale of Shadows, the right amount of yes.
Story
The story for Tandem: A Tale of Shadows hits faster than the first Venom movie and treats the first act as such. From what I could tell, you’re a small girl named Emma, you watch a stuffed bear named Fenton fly out of a buggy being dragged by a horse, and you chase after a walking/running stuffed bear in hopes of getting it back to the child (?) that dropped it. The buggy and bear lead you to a magically creepy castle that looks like something out of 7th Guest. What is hilarious by that comment, is that the story surrounds a magician’s missing son named Thomas Kane, thus the stuffed bear leading the way and the creepy magical castle that you must traverse. The story isn’t straightforward at the beginning, but honestly, it doesn’t need to be. It does pan out towards the end.
For such an Alice-looking game, the story, at least at the beginning, isn’t as important as the gameplay and the game seems okay with that. It’s almost if it needed a vessel to explain why the gameplay design was the way it was and then didn’t need to go further with its explanation (at least at the beginning). Will you be engaged with the story? From my perspective, not at all. I think that the devs at Monochrome came up with fun gameplay and needed to retrofit a story into it. That’s not a knock because wait until we get to the gameplay, but rather a gut-feeling observation. I certainly don’t want to discount the narrative design, but it’s nothing particularly special or engaging. Again, it doesn’t have to be, it just needs to be in place to give purpose. And purpose it gives.
As it stands, you won’t be invested too much in the ‘why this is happening’, but you’ll dive into the execution of ‘how’.
Speaking of ‘how’, let’s dig right into the gameplay.
Gameplay design
The gameplay design for Tandem: A Tale of Shadows is quite clever. It uses both Fenton and Emma working in tandem (lol) to get through medium-complicated puzzles. Emma is seen from the top-down view, where she will need to progress to push forward into the story. Her job is to control the lighting via a lamp, move obstacles and avoid enemies as needed, and get through a series of gates (and obstacles/creatures/traps) that are preventing her from moving forward. She is the rat trying to traverse the maze laid out in front of her.
Fenton is the one that has the most brutal Limbo-esque job. He is seen in a platformer viewpoint along the mansion’s walls above Emma and needs Emma’s light to use as a hill of sorts to jump from platform to platform. The lighting source (a lamp carried by Emma) creates a contrast with the top-down viewpoint that Emma resides in. That contrast creates a beautiful division of harshly lit falloff areas for heavy amounts of shadow. When you switch between Emma to Fenton (touch of a button), the screen changes from color to black/white, and illuminates Fenton’s platformer pathway. That black and white shift brings out that falloff from Emma’s lamp to create a platform/hill for Fenton to jump on. How Emma angles the light determines the success of Fenton traversing the hill. The light can be angled and crafted through objects and creatures around Emma, so you must move Emma to find the right angle to create the right path for Fenton. Not at all complicated, right? The goal of Fenton is to activate switches and unlock areas so that Emma can keep progressing forward safely to get through the mansion’s grounds and rooms.
Does all this work? Absolutely it does. The back and forth between Emma and Fenton is a well-designed main mechanic that opens a lot of possibilities for the direction of the game. None of the puzzles really become Dark Souls-esque stumpers of frustration, though some can become dangerous if you’re not paying attention. The puzzles seem to have a more simple solution that may not always be obvious at first, but don’t get in the way of enjoying what the game is trying to do. I have played plenty of puzzle games in my 40 years as a gamer and this one is one of the least frustrating games. It’s a balance that Monochrome did a good job to find.
The difficulty of the puzzles progresses well into climactic boss fights that do test the nerves of the gamer a bit. In the end, there’s nothing too incredibly complicated about the gameplay design, nor over-the-top challenging. This means that it can be a pick-up-and-go game for multiple types of gamers that range in different ages. The timeframe for completion, especially for an expert gamer, is short, but for an idiot like me, I have treated the experience like sipping a fine wine.
Regardless, the gameplay is clever, and it works for what it is trying to do.
Concerns
I don’t really have a lot of concerns with the game. I guess if I had to choose one, I would say that people might get tired of the back and forth between Emma and Fenton. The progression works in inches in the game, which is something people should expect, and if you didn’t love a game like The Witness, where you literally get zero story and are solving puzzle after puzzle, then you may not like this one too much. It’s not a game that you’re going to want to beat in a day because it will exhaust your brain after about two hours, and it won’t be enjoyable, but the adventure is short-lived for those wanting to quickly truck through it. I don’t see why anyone would want to go this route, but at the same time I don’t understand the fascination with a game like Dark Souls. I also don’t get speedrunners. Anyway, Tandem is a game that puzzle lovers will enjoy the hell out of, and that’s really the niche Monochrome seems to be looking at for this game.
While the difficulty of Tandem lies in a range of casual to expert, completely driven by puzzles probably won’t be an easy sell for everyone looking for a new experience, even when you throw in bosses and creepy enemies. The fault of the game lies within its rigid pointedness of gameplay that is truly built for a certain type of gamer. If a more engrossing story had been built for this game, then this helps to change that pointedness a bit, but the story isn’t engaging, nor does it really connect. Having a good story helps to hide the fact that you’re going through a stream of puzzles. Regardless of how clever those puzzle designs are, a strong narrative creates a shroud that connects the player to the game and gives them a sense of urgency.
All of that drama said, is the lack of a connecting story a major concern? No, especially at a reasonable price point of $24.99. For the amount of entertainment that comes with the clever switching back and forth between two characters to unravel a creepy mystery, that price hits the right spot. Monochrome did a great job of balancing out the difficulty with clever puzzle design, so it all works, even without a compelling story to drive the gameplay.
Conclusion
Tandem: A Tale of Shadows from Monochrome is a cleverly designed game that puzzle-loving gamers will enjoy. The range of difficulty helps to sell this, as does the level design and characters you confront in the game. If you don’t like puzzle games, then this probably won’t bring you into the genre.
