Game review: Child of Light for PS Vita
I know what you’re thinking. “Oh God, another video game review from Zoe. I wonder how much she hated this game.” Well in the somewhat less than immortal words of Hatty Hattington, hold onto your butts, because for once I actually liked a game. YES. Shocking as it may seem, Child of Light is for me a highly entertaining and addicting game, and I say this because after starting it on Friday night, I played for something close to 36 hours straight with no sleep and only a few breaks for food. Then after sleeping to recharge, I went right back in for another 14 hour romp to the ending. And unlike most games that I binge play in one sitting (because I hate them and want to get done with them), I really loved every battle and puzzle in this pretty world.
It’s not a total love affair, so I can’t give this a perfect score. I had issues with the writing (big shock, I know) and the story, and I saw the ending coming from the opening scene and still hated it. But before I get to any of that negativity, let me talk about all the stuff I did like. That’s going to be a longer list than usual.
For starters, there’s the story putting a young girl in the protagonist’s spotlight, a welcome change of pace from all the growly-voiced middle-aged white psychopaths that usually take the top spot. (And yes, I mean psychopath. When you murder a thousand people to accomplish any goal and never consider any solution besides violence, you’re a psychopath no matter what side of the law you pretend to be on.) Aurora’s story intro is a bit of Snow White and Harry Potter, as her father marries a wicked queen to replace his deceased wife. (Though how he didn’t notice the obvious evilosity of his new wife eludes me. (Yes, evilosity is totally a real word.)) Soon after the new queen moves in, Aurora seemingly dies and ends up awake on an altar far from her familiar home. Here she learns that she’s no ordinary girl, and she has a special destiny to fulfill. Her quest to return home takes her through the villages of several fantastic peoples, and along the way she is asked to help with their plights. Each of these missions ends up bringing her another party member to help her in her fights, and each of these companions have their own unique skill sets.
The graphics are just amazing, pretty in a way that reminds me of children’s storybooks and some older styles of cell-painted animation. Aurora quickly gains the ability to fly, which opens up the world to exploration, and I can’t recall a single part of the game where I didn’t end up blurting out “Ooh, that’s pretty!” If I were giving out scores based solely on the prettiful, this game would have a perfect score.
The sound is equally good and fitting for the story, and my only nitpick is, there needed to be more. None of the music is grating, even after multiple listens, but after a while it just fades into the background because I’ve heard it over and over. So yeah, I would have liked a little more from the symphonic section who scored this game. For what is there, I will praise and say it’s certainly the best game music I’ve heard in a while.
The game play deserves a lot of praise, both in the side-scrolling world exploration parts and in the turn-based RPG sections. Aurora is aided on her quest by a sprite named Igniculus, and in addition to opening certain coffers and doors for her in the exploration sections, he can also blind enemies and allow Aurora to slip past them. This is handy because if you approach an enemy from behind, you get first strike in the turn-based battles. Igniculus can be made to glow brighter to light dark areas, and if Aurora is hurt while exploring, his glow can also heal her. This energy comes at a cost, shown as a white bar at the top of the screen, and it can either be replenished slowly with time, or more quickly by locating glowing flowers called wishes. Wishes release a series of glowing balls, and if these are collected in the right order, they can even give health and magic points back to Aurora and her companions.
In the turn-based areas, things get really interesting. First of all, you can swap either Aurora or her companions out on any turn, an instant change that doesn’t lose you your turn to cast. So while only two companions can be on the battlefield at any given time, that doesn’t mean you’re limited to who you use. I admit, once I found Rubella the jester, I mostly relied on her and Aurora for the bulk of my battles. But I dabbled with all my crew, and I can’t say there was anyone who didn’t prove useful. In particular, Oengus, a huge brute found later on in the game, is really handy for the ability to cleave all the enemies with his claws in a single attack. When this is augmented with the right elemental occuli stone and a spell from Aurora for increasing damage, Oengus has some of the most devastating critical hits of any character in your crew.
What makes the fights so addicting, though, is the slider at the bottom of the screen. This bar is divided into a longer wait section and a shorter cast section. Your party and the enemies are both shown on this bar, and when you or the monsters hit the line separating cast from waiting, they are allowed to choose an action. Every action has a cast time, from short to very long, and here’s where things get interesting. Lets say that Aurora and a monster both hit the cast line at the same time. If a monster casts a short spell and I cast a long spell, the monster will reach the end of the bar first and attack Aurora. Unless she dodges the attack, the damage done will interrupt her cast and throw her back a ways into the waiting bar. This same trick also works for me, so for instance, I can cast a very long spell while the monsters are still in the waiting phase of their turn, and just as they’re entering the casting phase, I hit them with a huge spell and knock them back into waiting. With a bit of strategy and juggling, it’s possible to go an entire match without the monsters getting to attack once. (It’s also possible to hit all three enemies in the casting phase and knock them all back into waiting, which is how you earn one of the game’s few trophies.)
Igniculus has his own part to play in these fights because his glow can blind enemies and significantly slow down their progress on the waiting bar. He can only blind one enemy at a time, and his energy depletes, so he has to be managed just like anyone else in your crew. On each battle screen are at least two wish plants, and the first time they’re used, they refill his energy bar and release magic and health points for your active combatants. If you should be in a battle for very long, the plants can recharge, but the subsequent uses only give energy to recharge Igniculus. To recharge health and magic for your crew after that, you’ll need potions. Fortunately, you’ll find plenty of these while exploring, and while fighting monsters, who drop them as loot.
As with most RPGs, there’s a crafting system, but this one is real simple, and you only craft occuli jewels. These jewels range in quality from rough to brilliant and can be given to your companions to fit in one of three slots and enhance their attack or defense, or to give them boosts in certain areas. For instance, equipping a diamond in a certain slot will allow a companion to collect extra XP during fights, very handy when you’re trying to level up faster.
But, it wasn’t until late in the game that I started getting more rare gems, and the pathetically short “tip” screen only shows a few crafting combinations. I went online to find a more complete occuli crafting chart, and that’s when I discovered that I was supposed to be hoarding emeralds and crafting gems towards the goal of making one “princess stone.” (The only stone in the game that only has one level of quality, by the way.) Well, this required a ton of extra grinding to find the emeralds needed for crafting, and this is the point when the game got slightly irritating for the number of battles I had to go through just to get the few gems I needed. And, right after I finally did get that one princess stone crafted, suddenly the game went from Ebenezer Scrooge to Hermann Gmeiner* is its gem-granting generosity. So on the way to the final battle, I had the game dropping gems I’d wanted for 15 levels with sudden and infuriating frequency, like:
Game: “Say, didn’t you need this?”
Me: (with teeth clench) “Fifteen levels ago, I did, yes.”
And now we come to the two biggest flaws of the game, the first of which is the writing, or more specifically of the choice to write in rhymes. Rubella’s running joke is that she’s incapable of coming up with a rhyming word, even though she’s supposedly a lyricist. But the sad truth is, the writers struggle to make rhymes for most of the game. They repeat a lot of rhymes or pick a bad rhyme when another word would have made the meaning clearer. For instance, rout is used several times, but bout would have fit the situations better. And I will say as someone who wrote a book with a rhyming narrator, this kind of thing is not easy to do, so I’ll give them kudos for experimenting and trying something different. But I’ll also say that they didn’t do a very good job with it.
And then there’s the ending, which I guessed at the beginning. I didn’t work off any clues at the opening scene, by the way. I said, “Well, this is an indie game, so instead of giving me a happy ending, everyone will die and Aurora will be forced to become the queen to a broken land.” And I wasn’t even slightly wrong. I gotta say, I’m getting real sick of indie game writers and this “you won but you lost” bullshit. I hated this with Guacamelee, I hated it with Miami Hotline, I hated it with Battleblock Theater (review forthcoming in the next few days) and I hated it with…well, with pretty much every indie game that’s gone this route. Seriously, after putting in forty-some-odd hours into a game, the last thing I need is an ending that says “Fuck you for playing, your prize is a pile of dog shit and broken bottles.”
*Takes deep breath* What makes this even more frustrating is that there’s the glimmer of a really intriguing history about this game world as told in a series of “confessions” that you collect by exploring the side-scrolling levels. There’s a lot of wasted character development for Aurora and her companions, whose conflicts with others are summarily addressed in one or two sentences each near the very end of the game. There’s a very rushed feeling to the story in all aspects. The narrator of the game has vocal parts at the start and ending, but rarely says anything during the middle chapters. Cut scenes in between chapters are “blink and you’ll miss them” short. And despite the toughness of many of the earlier boss fights, the final two fights were…really pathetic. I was all keyed up and ready for some epic fuckery, and both times, the bosses dropped in a few minutes. I was left blinking at the screen both times while asking, “Wait, that’s it?” There’s no secondary “perfect form” to either boss, and none of the dirty tricks that earlier bosses pulled to make them challenging. All the earlier fights lasted around ten mintues, and used up a lot LOT of my potions to keep my crew alive. The final bosses both went down in under two minutes. Yes, seriously. So all this epicness builds up to a whimper of an ending that was kind of underwhelming.
And here’s the thing that makes the rushed undercooked bits more frustrating: Ubisoft liked this concept so much that they footed the bill to have it completed. So here’s this indie game that has a huge ton of potential, and what it really needed is more time for a fleshed out history, more work on the rhyming writing style, more voice actors to play the parts of the various characters, more music, and more effort put into the final fights. But even with financial support from Ubisoft, what came out was slightly undercooked.
The thing is, for once, I’m going to give the story a bit of a free pass for several reasons. The first is that this game is really pretty. The second is that this is one of the few times I’ll get to play a game as a girl without her being an alternate choice to a male. The third is that I spent 36 hours playing on the addicting siren call of “just one more level, and then I’ll quit.” And I didn’t stop until sleep was an absolute requirement. So obviously, I had a lot of fun playing this, and I can see playing it again, if for no other reason than to get that princess stone crafted earlier in the game. Then maybe if I make it to the final bosses at a lower level, perhaps then they’ll be more appropriately aggravating.
So, I’m giving Child of Light 4 stars, and I’d recommend it to all RPG fans looking for something a little different. This is the ONLY game in my PS Vita library that’s listed as 100% complete, but that’s because the trophies aren’t all that demanding. You can get them all on one pass through the game, something I wish I could say about other games. (Because I really hate finishing a game and seeing “36% complete” because I didn’t find all the golden sneetches, or kill enemies with all the required combos, or jump to my death for a stupid suicide trophy, or whatever.) If you like those first few battles and the gorgeous art and music, odds are good that you, like me, will be more forgiving of that wimpy, awful ending.
(* “Uh, Zoe, why did you pull out Hermann Gmeiner, of all people, as you example of philanthropy?” you ask. And I reply, “You’ll just have to play the game to uncover the extremely tenuous link between the game and this Austrian philanthropist.”)
