Lost in Shadow is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-ahead platform game. Its core mechanics aren’t that different from the original Prince of Persia, a game over twenty years old. But underneath the standard gameplay lies a mysterious, frightening, bewildering game, all delivered in a gorgeous aesthetic and one really great gimmick.
I'm not sure why I found this game so affecting. It is, for all intents and purposes, Limbo without any difficult puzzles. In fact, the progression from level to level, from puzzle to puzzle, is pretty smooth and not at all challenging. That would be doing a disservice to this game, however, which seems to understand a few things that Limbo doesn't in the "aesthetically-privileged, abstract platforming" genre niche that has popped up an alarming amount of times in the last few years.
At the start of the game, you’re introduced via a solemn, silent cutscene to the setting of the game, a massive tower. A boy approaches a door, but not before a man clad in armor relegates him to a… less than corporeal state. See, the main hook to Lost in Shadow is that instead of jumping from platform to platform and interacting with the world in a normal way, your character can only interact with the shadow world. This permeates every aspect of the game, as every action becomes reliant on the light shone on the platforms in the foreground. For the player, this means reorienting your normal means of perception in order to make sense of this dangerous world.
What Lost in Shadow absolutely nails is the feeling of being dropped into the middle of an alien landscape, dangling on the precipice of life and death. Your character can withstand a fair amount of damage, but the number of traps and enemies that need dispatching can occasionally make things overwhelming. The Brian Eno-esque ambient soundtrack and perfectly designed soundscape also play into the downtrodden atmosphere of the game. In fact, the entire game is just a little depressing – collecting your shattered memories strewn all over the tower and making a journey into the unknown is an amazing experience, but hardly an uplifting one.
The game manages to maintain an atmosphere of loneliness and longing that is perfectly suited to the experience of severing the body from its physical state. Unlike Limbo (and I'm sorry to keep picking on that game, but still), the game never feels tawdry. Darkness isn't maintained seemingly for darkness's sake; in Lost in Shadow, the game is far less interested in shocking the player and much more interested in maintaining one or two "tones." If video games can be allowed to have a literature analog, both Limbo and Lost in Shadow could be seen as the poems of the video gaming world. The only difference is that Lost in Shadow is much more committed to the tone it wants to explore than Limbo is.
The game succeeds at one of the toughest tricks in video gaming, and that’s delivering an involving experience while keeping everything ambiguous. The game goes far beyond the limitations suggested by its originally-planned WiiWare release – the subtly wondrous level design keeps things fresh, even when the length threatens to keep things “same-y.” The desperate need to uncover the mystery of the setting and situation makes for a very compelling game. The gameplay can be a little bit pedestrian – the game might not have been better without its clunky, unfocused combat, but it certainly wouldn't have been worse. But Lost in Shadow's very structure indicates progression and reward in a very real way. Making it to the end of Limbo, or many other platformers, seems entirely arbitrary. Though the developers of Limbo would contend that its abstract progression was up for "discussion," Lost in Shadow's progression – up a tower, through every floor – makes the game seem like a real journey. This isn't an exercise in world-building, it's an exercise in delivering a sense of accomplishment and terror and fear and wonder in the player.
The only place in which Lost in Shadow really falters is that its central conceit perhaps isn’t taken far enough – the first few hours are quite a bit easier than the devilish last half, and the mystery untangles at a glacial pace. But the atmosphere of the game, its blurry and vague storyline and beautiful, if simple, gameplay, all contribute to an extremely memorable experience. The game is far from perfect, of course, but it manages to succeed in spite of this, something I appreciate more and more. It delivers a coherent experience that far surpasses the likes of Limbo – one must remember that Limbo is the game with Achievements and leaderboards. But moreso than many modern games, designed to be expendable, Lost in Shadow is a game that will stay with you for a long, long time.
Note: this review was originally published in The Carillon, the University of Regina's student newspaper.