Valley of Shadow

At its core, Valley of Shadow plays as a blend between a walking simulator and a puzzle game, with most of the time being spent on solving room-sized puzzles while traversing through several temples with unique mechanics.

The game is narrated from the perspective of a patient during a cognitive behavioral therapy session. This patient, Anthony, is the main author of the game and at the same time its main protagonist, the character who the player controls as they solve puzzles, and whose tragic past is slowly unraveled as the player goes deeper into the temples. Just like it often happens when exploring the various rooms of the subconscious mind during a therapy session, different fragments of memories resurface, some of them being comforting, while others being, as expected from a therapy session, quite traumatic. Anthony’s journey through the temples of his mind is a symbol of his journey of dealing with these childhood traumas, a way of learning how to embrace past experiences and finding how to heal from them.

Valley of Shadow was created together with Anthony’s two siblings, Nicholas and Maria, who we often see in the hundreds of childhood pictures attached to the walls of the temples’ rooms or in snippets from old VHS tapes. These act as collectibles that the player can gather throughout the game. Of the four different types of collectibles, only two of them are tracked in the main hub, which the player can access only at specific points during gameplay, when the memory stream becomes too difficult to overcome, Anthony needs a place to “anchor”. Sadly, the ones that are tracked are only those that have few collectibles (acting as “special” / “rare” ones). The majority of them (hundreds of pictures and floppy disks) remain untracked, despite the game having achievements for finding all of them. While there is an indicator of a nearby collectible, the fact that you cannot go back to a previous room after you solved it or revisit previous temples makes obtaining 100% completion a colossal task. For achievement hunters, the combination of having to hunt for hundreds of missable collectibles and the heavy story is also not very optimal, as most of the focus goes into searching for them instead of being immersed in the story.

The puzzle mechanics revolve around using and combining the three abilities of the staff that Antony holds during his journey: creating a light sphere at a specific point and directing light beams to light up different types of receptors, shooting colored crystals at specific targets, launching a fireball that disintegrates ice. Color prisms, requirements of shining direct light on sockets or keeping them in shadow, performing actions in a specific order or finding the correct standing position to do so, all combined and with some platforming bits (later in the game) gradually make the puzzles more and more complex. The game is entirely linear, with the downside being that there’s no way to go to a different room / sublevel if you’re stuck on the current one. There’s also no hint system available to help you progress.

A few optional puzzles will have you decrypt a sequence of characters. These are used to gather game cartridge collectibles that reference classic video game franchises and their mechanics. One way it does this is that there is typically something to find behind the player when they arrive in a new area.

It’s rather clear that for the devs of Valley of Shadow, the game is a deeply autobiographical experience, created as a cathartic process to overcome childhood traumas. For the player though, this journey might give them the uncomfortable feeling of intruding into someone’s personal space, even more so considering that they are the witness of a private therapy session where someone else is dealing with their inner demons and whose deepest secrets and vulnerabilities are exposed. Players who have had similar experiences with alcoholic parents, domestic abuse or the loss of a family member at a young age can perhaps relate to the references given here, or even empathize with the protagonist. For me though, as someone lucky enough to not experience any of these, the game lacked an element to make me invested in its story.

What the game does really well is the voice acting. I don’t know if the voiceovers are live recordings from therapy sessions, but they feel hauntingly real. You can clearly hear the tremor in Anthony’s voice when dealing with a traumatic memory or how his whole being calms down at the guidance of his therapist using standard phrases to help him overcome the heightened levels of anxiety triggered by some of these memories

Valley of Shadow is certainly not a bad game, but specific design decisions make it unsuitable for just any fan of puzzle games or of the puzzle mechanics that the game uses. If you are sensitive to emotional triggers or if you feel uncomfortable with the idea of digging into someone’s soul or experiences, you might not enjoy the game in its fullness. If you dislike the pressure of having to solve a certain puzzle without having other alternatives or hints, then this is probably not the right game for you. If you loathe missing out on one out of hundreds of collectibles, without any way to go back for it, then this is surely not a good match for you. If, on the other hand, none of these aspects bother you in the slightest and you feel that you can relate to the story of the main character, then you’re the right choice for the game.