Taking a break from exploration platformers for a while, and you better believe it'll be a short one, I've decided to return to what I've always felt is the grandfather of the modern Indie game movement: puzzle-platformers. Beautifully rendered worlds, melancholic story delivery, pretentiousness thankfully optional: the humble puzzle-platformer usually creates a novel set of mechanics and an intriguing setting to couch them in and then gracefully bows out once it's shown off all it has to offer, letting some other similar project take the limelight. That was what the Indie space felt like for a while there after Braid, before it exploded into the greatly varied marketplace of ideas it is now, and Tandem: A Tale of Shadows plays like an homage to that time. True to its name, Tandem has two main factors to its puzzles: dual protagonists that have to work together, and the use of shadow and light to create bridges and solutions to puzzles. The story sees Victorian tween Emma and the sapient stuffed bear Fenton join forces to track down the missing magician Thomas Kane. Soon lost within a mansion filled with unusual clockwork dolls and other machinery, the pair must keep their own survival at the forefront of their minds as they look for clues behind Kane's current whereabouts.

The game does a neat thing with perspective for its two playable characters, with Emma exploring the mansion from a top-down viewpoint while Fenton exists in the same space and at the same angle but as a 2D platformer hero. In cutscenes this is rendered by having Fenton walking across the walls while powered by some sort of shadowy magic, his ability to move restricted by light sources: he is powerless in full shadow, so Emma often has to figure out some way to keep the lights on. Fenton also treats all shadows as solid objects too so any created by solid objects can be used as walkways, though producing them will usually require some environmental manipulation by Emma. Invariably, both have to move through areas together as they'll need each other's help before too long: sort of doing a Cookie and Cream thing though fortunately without any simultaneous movement to worry about (instead, the player is able to switch at any time). There's five "worlds" set around the mansion, first in the outside gardens and then moving through the basement and kitchens, and the eight to ten stages found within these worlds tend to be fairly short excursions based on a recurring theme for that area. For instance, the gardens have you dodging mechanical spiders by keeping out of their line of sight or distracting them with noises, while the kitchens have these odd cuboid creatures that can be pulled around to weigh down switches or create shadows for Fenton to use.

The challenge factor for the game is on the light side, so to speak. Both Fenton and Emma can be killed but it's only ever a slap on the wrist with a quick respawn to the nearest safe space. Each stage is relatively small with a smattering of puzzles to overcome and while Fenton's sections tend to involve some occasionally tough platforming Emma's, conversely, don't ever get more taxing than a bit of running around and stealthy concealment. The platforming isn't always excellent—Fenton's jumps don't always commit to long distance when you want them to, meaning a lot of easy deaths—but it's adequate for the slim skill requirement the game asks from you. The use of light is very cleverly done with a lot of chiaroscuro to emphasis what's a dark enough level of shadow for Fenton to use and what isn't. Emma has a light source for much of the early game, so making an ideal shadow bridge often just boils down to having her stand behind a wall at the right angle, but later on you have to make use of fixed environmental lighting and pushable objects that can be used to block it out fully or partially. The darkness is often your ally for both stealth sections and Fenton's traversal, though light is often every bit as important. These accommodating light/dark visuals are enhanced further by demarcations that indicate a danger zone—a sentinel's line of sight glitters to let you know how far it extends, and a ferocious creature will have icons surrounding it to inform you of the range of its grasp—so there's no real moment in the game where a puzzle feels unfair or that's it being too withholding. As always, my biggest killer is my impatience rather than any sense of feeling completely lost, though there have been a few occasions where a switch or lever felt easily missed or some background object looked more solid than it actually was in the game's typically visually-busy level design.

Speaking of which, the game does a good job with its steampunk aesthetic. The protagonist Emma looks a bit last decade in terms of her 3D model quality but the more simplistic Fenton character fares a little better. The environments are rich with details, as stated, with all sorts of background objects littering the walls if rarely in your direct path. Some items can be looked at closer, presumably because the artists took a long while to make them and having the game be stuck in its top-down view means not seeing most of them in all their glory. There are also optional artworks to collect: they invariably involve finding a secret room off the beaten path, either as Emma or Fenton, and the game never tells you where these places are so a guide is often handy (I'd recommend coming back after completing the story just so you don't accidentally spoil any of the puzzles—there's one that spoiler-blocks how you uncover the secrets so you can just jot down which levels have them instead and go look for them yourself). One last thing is that they clearly set this game in Victorian London but the child voice actor for Emma clearly couldn't conceal her strong French accent (the developers Monochrome Paris are, perhaps unsurprisingly, also French) despite some passable English pronunciations. It did make me wonder why this game couldn't just be set in Paris instead; it's not like they don't have a big, pointy mechanical marvel from around that era that they're all very proud of, after all. Does France just not have le vapeurpunque in their dictionnaires?

Tandem: A Tale of Shadows has a few irritating glitches here and there, though most are of the benign visual kind, and the overall lower challenge level might bore those looking for something with a little more bite to it, but otherwise it's a fair puzzle-platformer with no shortage of clever ideas for its central gimmicks wrapped in an appealing steampunk aesthetic. Between this, The Room series, and the Vaporum series I'm starting to come around to the idea of living in an era of technology where almost any device in your home can suddenly burst open and scald your face with a jetstream of superheated water vapor. I mean, that just sounds real fun. And this game is fun too; plus, as ever, I'm thankful someone is (or many someones are) maintaining the supply chain of whimsical, tonally-somber puzzle-platformers to keep the frontier spirit of that early Indie period alive. Man, what is it coming to that I'm starting to get nostalgic about XBLA-era games? Oh right, probably because it's been almost 20 years since the 360 came out. Oof, I felt that one.

Rating: 4 out of 5.