Even though its color palette and design practically scream, âIco,â Hudson Softâs Lost in Shadow for the Wii is inspired just as much by clever platform-jumping games like Paper Mario, Braid and Cloning Clyde.
Its inventive, light-based puzzles and artsy look should make it a critical success, and if its still undisclosed back-story justifies the core design, we could be looking at a dark horse game of the year contender on the Wii.
Lost in Shadow, due out in the fall, opens with a boy, held in chains at the top of an ominous-looking tower. An equally menacing executioner materializes out of the ether, and cleaves the shadow from the boyâs body, which crumples to the ground before being rousted by a shadowy fairy. The executioner then picks up the shadow and flings it off the side of the tower.
Once that introductory cut scene finishes, you begin play as the boyâs shadow. Your goal is to climb back up to the top of the tower, assisted by the fairy. During a recent demo at Konamiâs Gamers Night in San Francisco, I got a chance to play through a level of the game, as well as see some of the gameâs more complex mechanics unfold during other playersâ sessions.
The genius of Lost in Shadowâs core gameplay element is that itâs easy to grasp, yet allows for an ever-increasing level of complexity. In short, you play as a shadow and interact not with the physical level itself, but the shadows cast by its architecture. In traversing the levels, youâll be doing a lot of running, jumping and fighting with the sword, all thankfully operated without the use of gimmicky motion controls. The monsters you fight? Theyâre shadows, too. The new wrinkle, though, is that the fairy who accompanies you, currently nicknamed âSpangle,â has the ability to interact with certain objects in the physical world. Youâll use your brain, the shadowâs sword and Spangleâs muscle to collect three keys that allow you to exit each level.
Controlling Spangle is as simple as using the Wii remote as a pointer and using the trigger to manipulate objects. In the relatively simple level that I tried, these functions were used to open up new areas. Though the bulk of the game is played in two dimensions, at certain times youâll have the opportunity to rotate the shadowâs orientation, adding a 3D element to some of the puzzles. Watching othersâ sessions, I saw how the player gains the ability to manipulate the angle and intensity of the gameâs light source.
From time to time, youâll come across memories left behind by other characters, but the text for these memories was left out of the build I played. Each time you unlock a memory, your shadow gains a little âweight,â which is expressed in grams and reflected in the gameâs health bar.
Because Lost in Shadow is still in development, we accessed levels through a debug menu. The bulk of the connecting narrative is still under wraps or in development. As an admirer of Braidâs stunning visuals and ambitious, ambiguous story, Iâm looking forward to finding out how director Shinichi Kasahara and his team flesh out the world as the game nears completion.
I know a game is coming along nicely when, once Iâve played it a bit, all my questions revolve around how the story will jell with the gameplay. After my hands-on time with the demo, my mind kept traveling back to that opening cinematic, the unfilled-in bits of exposition and how your shadowâs weight would be incorporated into the final build.
Why does the executioner sever the boyâs shadow from his body? Is the boy in control of his shadow, or is it a sentient being in its own right? If itâs self-aware, why is the shadow, now liberated from the being itâs been tethered to its whole life, motivated to mount a rescue when it could just walk off, and play with the other shadows? How does Spangle fit into all of this?
Does the shadow represent a soul, and are the characters occupying a literal purgatory, as the opening cinematic hints at? Or is the whole thing a metaphor, with the executioner standing in for a traumatic event or antagonizer? I look forward to finding out more as the gameâs fall release approaches.
Eric Wittmershaus writes a weekly column and occasionally blogs about video games for The Press Democrat, a New York Times regional newspaper in Santa Rosa, California. You can reach him at eric [dot] wittmershaus [at] pressdemocrat [dot] com and follow him on Twitter as @gamewit.
