I’m not very familiar with TotK and I’m not sure how familiar you are with game development, but just in case you’re not very:

When making something like a shadow puzzle it is very unlikely they’re actually checking shadow conditions, and if they are it’s probably very sparse/only a couple of pixels.

For instance, if you know the position of the light source, the position of the shadow catcher and the position of the shadow receiver you could approximate the shadow casting with much simpler geometry. If Link is just treated as a box then you only need to check where each corner would cast a shadow and see if that overlaps the area you care about.

When done correctly the player would think it’s link’s shadow that’s being tested but in reality it’s nothing to do with the shadow, it’s just a much simpler estimation of a shadow that works well enough to trick players.

Game development is all smoke and mirrors. Tell the players one thing such as “This NPC is always at this location” then unload them when the player isn’t looking. It’s all sweet lies and I love it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘vise’ written down before, I always just assumed it was spelled ‘vice’! You learn something new every day

Ah, a common mistake to make. It’s not ‘re-ddit,’ Im pretty sure it comes from ‘reddi-t’ as in “Ready Tea” but like many early 2000s websites they tried to make it sound more approachable, so it’s just ‘reddi-t’ as your cup of tea will be cool enough to drink by the time it’s transmitted all your data.