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Shade opens with the nameless protagonist awakening in his studio apartment before sunrise. Examining the apartment reveals that the protagonist is preparing to depart on a trip to Death Valley. After the protagonist locates his plane tickets and begins addressing the various tasks on his to-do list, the appliances and furniture spontaneously crumble and transform into piles of sand upon touch. The apartment slowly becomes buried under dunes of sand. The sand disappears briefly, suggesting the experience was illusionary, but then the protagonist feels dizzy and sits down. The apartment vanishes and the protagonist is suddenly outside and in the middle of a desert. The protagonist notices a small humanoid figure walking across the sand; interacting with the figure causes it to move more and more sluggishly until it eventually passes out and dies. The figure then says to the protagonist, "You win, Okay, my turn again." The game then ends with the message "Nothing left to do. Time passes. The sun crawls higher."
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