Tandem: A Tale of Shadows Review (PC)

Fenton, the magical bear, stands on the trigger for a door that traps an enemy spider. This leaves his partner, the human Emma, able to drag around a massive piece of wall that’s inexplicably on wheels. She blocks a certain source of light, and the girl moves out of the way of potential enemies. Then Fenton can engage in some light jumping to get to the crystal that will move the pair to the next level.

Tandem: A Tale of Shadows is the work of Monochrome Paris and was published by Hatinh Interactive. The game is offered on the Nintendo Switch, the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and the PC, where I played it using Steam. It’s a pretty solid puzzle platformer experience.

The game starts with a young girl named Emma (Alice would have been too on the nose) going to the mansion of a well-known magician to investigate his disappearance. On the way there she meets up with a teddy bear named Fenton, who clearly has magical abilities. The two join forces to solve the puzzles that stand in the way of their search. There’s not too much story to explore along the way, with just a few cutscenes that offer a little more info about the story. But the focus of the game is on puzzles, not on delivering a deep narrative about the nature of magic or the inner lives of the characters.

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Tandem: A Tale of Shadows is all about the riddles a level throws out and the mechanics that will solve them. Emma acts in the real world of the magic mansion pushing levels, standing on pressure plates, moving objects around, avoiding enemies and traps. The player watches her from a top-down perspective and does a lot of moving around to get her to where she needs to be. Fenton is a clearly magical being and he lives inside a particular type of shadow. If it’s too dark he cannot move. If the light is too powerful, he will fall into the massive spikes hidden in the walls. He plays using more classic platform mechanics, but he also interacts with certain environmental elements.

Light is very important to both of the characters. The teddy needs solid shadow to move through the world, all of it created by Emma when she manipulates the environment. The idea is to take a look at the level and see the various keys, doors, and buttons that can be interacted with. Then create a decent plan and tweak it when required during execution. Some timing-based sequences feel out of place but nothing too bad.

Tandem: A Tale of Shadows delivers some very good Eureka moments without introducing too much frustration to the experience. If one character dies the game quickly resets to well-placed checkpoints and there’s also an option to simply restart a level. There were moments when I simply didn’t know the best way to move forward but a little bit of experimentation allowed me to find the solution.

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The biggest problem with the game is that everything exists to serve the puzzles. Both the story and the universe are only here to create a playground for Emma and Fenton. There is no immersion and little personality for the characters or the levels they deal with.

Tandem: A Tale of Shadows has a visual style that mixes a lot of references, creating a world that feels dreamlike and made of plastic at the same time. There’s some Alice in here but there are none of the weirder elements of that world. A little Jules Verne might be there but again with all the edges filed off. Some ambiguous nostalgia can be spotted in interesting small touches inside the levels. But the world itself is not coherent and only exists to deliver interesting puzzles and to create ways for the two characters to deal with them. The voice work is very mediocre, and the soundtrack does almost nothing to enhance the feeling of mystery or to add coherence, which is disappointing.

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The Good

The Bad

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