Of Light and Shadow

Of Light and Shadow is a freeware game designed by a small indie team of Austrian students and as is usually the case it shows us how these unknown minds can come up with a brilliant concept. Created with the Unity 3D engine, this is a clever 2.5D side-scrolling game with a couple of tricks up its sleeve.

In this case, we have a duo of main characters that have a distinctive quality about them - one is capable only of moving in the light while the other has darkness as his biggest ally, since the contrary will purely incinerate them. The first one is a breezy character, one that makes jumping his main strength, while the other, more robotic character is incapable of jumping but uses his suit as a sort of anti-gravity device, walking like a spider in any kind of flat surface. The characters are smoothly animated and even enjoy a few cute idle animations to make them look more alive.

While in the first levels we get to know each character’s abilities, soon we’ll be able to switch from one to the other and overcome the obstacles that the designers throw at us. Frequent and sudden switches from light to darkness, side-scrolling monsters that threaten to gobble us whole, platforms that move in weird patterns and more. The strange alien world where Of Light and Shadow is set has a lot of surprises for us, including the two final sections which are particularly ingenious. There are some frustrating parts in the game but a nice checkpoint system avoids that we incur in an excessive amount of swearing.

Of Light and Shadow is a brilliant game that goes a long way to show how an indie team with the right amount of talent and mindset can break the mould and prove that there are some good ideas worth developing. With a little more work and longevity this could easily end up on Steam and other digital portals, but hopefully the team will strike gold with their next game, The Balloon Quest, a platformer so cute it shouldn’t be played by diabetics.

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