A Shade Darker Than Gray
Ronthelawn · 2024 · Casual, Interactive Fiction, Hidden Object, 2.5D, Third Person
PC
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →
Screenshots
About A Shade Darker Than Gray
Short. casual, dark comady story game based in a fictional gray world.
You go to school and make your way through the day while trying to survive. You may be bullied, insulted, bruised, and cut but at least your alive right?
It's like a visual novel but with walking to make you feel more alone!
This game only has one available language, which is English.Come down the rabbit hole of depression, exploring a boring color scape as you try to make sense of the world in one day. This game uses primarily four to five colors to give off that extra sense of dread. Where better to go than school!
Missing the bus here is no big deal you can walk.
But remember it's just a game!
About 15 minutes in length for a play through. There're 6 different endings, 8 collectibles, and some mini games. Side content such as small event. and funny quotes.
Over 100+ different quotes to find throughout.
Unfortunatly there is no controller support as of this version.
You go to school and make your way through the day while trying to survive. You may be bullied, insulted, bruised, and cut but at least your alive right?
It's like a visual novel but with walking to make you feel more alone!
This game only has one available language, which is English.Come down the rabbit hole of depression, exploring a boring color scape as you try to make sense of the world in one day. This game uses primarily four to five colors to give off that extra sense of dread. Where better to go than school!
Missing the bus here is no big deal you can walk.
But remember it's just a game!
About 15 minutes in length for a play through. There're 6 different endings, 8 collectibles, and some mini games. Side content such as small event. and funny quotes.
Over 100+ different quotes to find throughout.
Unfortunatly there is no controller support as of this version.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
✦ AI summary
Players appreciate the game's distinctive artistic style, minimalist audio design, and introspective exploration of bullying themes, with some finding it emotionally impactful. However, most criticize the narrative for feeling disjointed and poorly written, with inconsistent logic, unrealistic character reactions, and pretentious dialogue that reads more like amateur fanfiction than a cohesive story. The lack of meaningful gameplay and grammatical errors further detract from the experience, leaving players frustrated that the game prioritizes telling over showing.
⠀7 found this helpful
A short, introspective game on bullying and how people are treated. Got all the endings too. 6/101 found this helpful
I think the art in the game is interesting. I thought the lack of audio other than occasional white noise was a nice choice. The story was, however, unbearable. It read like a fanfic with no string of logical events. It was just back to back to back to back of doing something, an realistic reaction by NPC's, and then somehow an even more unrealistic reaction to follow. I get that its a game based in an e-ink world, but you can only suspend disbelief for so long. Personal pet peeve: I find the varyingly correct and incorrect grammar to be off-putting. Hardly a game breaking facet, but still irritating.
"A Shade Darker Than Gray" is an e-book (but with a bit of walking so wow, we escape the "e-book" boilerplate I have to use every time some author gets confused and thinks Steam is Harper Collins or something). It's short, it's bad, and wow, the graphics are remarkable...y awful. What do you do in the game? Walk around a bit and get exposed to some really pretentious high school goth poetry equivalent writing. So, it's hard to describe this as a game, the focus of the product is more like that of an e-book/visual novel, there's only minor, shallow and uninteresting gameplay elements. The crux of this is to push some very low quality, badly done fan-fiction tier writing, where we see once more a developer fail to understand the importance of "Show, don't tell", and for whatever reason, weren't able to convey their narrative through gameplay, giving us endless lines of badly written e-book text instead. My gaming rig is not a kindle. The game is quite short, and can be run through in just 15 minutes. The lack of content here makes it hard to suggest it's worth spending the time to add to your library and download. And when the best thing you can say about a game is there's …
Yeah, no! I like a game that is wildly different than others, disturbing, and even has questionable "art", but this one just doesn't play well
Fun and enjoyable until it made me cry.
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