1. Child of Light is the game equivalent of big movie studio releasing an Oscar bait movie. It's quiet, contemplative game released by Ubisoft, a giant studio known for sprawling open worlds and considerable bombast.
2. W/ its ornate, hand-drawn look, it is unequivocally a beautiful game. A later sidequest had me going back through from near the end to the very beginning area by area and, even after looking at this stuff for hours on end and having seen everything before, I was continually impressed by the gorgeous detail top to bottom.
3. Almost as striking as the graphics is the fact that all of the dialog is done in verse and it's most often rhyming at that. This is a brave artistic decision, which I appreciate, and fits the fairy-tale setting perfectly even if there's quite a bit of it that doesn't really land.
4. This gets categorized as a platformer and an RPG but it is really
neither. It's really
more of an adventure game. You can injure yourself traversing the world
but it doesn't really feel like this is supposed to be a
challenge like and most of the gameplay is
pure exploration and storytelling punctuated by RPG-like turnbased battles.
5. Actually, it has the makings of a wonderful, deep RPG but these elements ultimately feel underutilized. Child of Light is a really easy game. There's no way around it. Still, its many aspects come together marvelously.
6. The battle system, for example, is a fantastic dance between actions that take varying lengths w/ varied cool downs and a myriad of ways to manipulate the timeline of events to your advantage. You can dominate or be destroyed w/ the same party build depending how you manage the encounter. It's awesome.
7. Rather than a full kit of equipment, each character can equip three gemstones, giving you a paper, rock, scissors type system of elemental attacks and defense or an array of other buffs if you prefer. The variations you can get w/ just three equipment slots is pretty staggering. It's enough that you can make pretty much any party work so long as you get everyone equipped w/ the right gemstones. Again, awesome.
8. On top of all this, you get a branched skill tree to use as your character levels up in addition to some fixed bonuses. This doesn't so much let you completely rejigger your characters so much as it allows you to focus them on the skills you actually use.
9. The real issue is you level up so often it's actually annoying. Esp. once your party swells in size, it feels like every encounter winds up w/ someone leveling up. After a while, you just stop being excited about it. This is also probably the reason the game is so easy. Balance is a really tough thing and, to be blunt, they whiffed it here.
10. Or maybe I'm just so smart and amazing that is was easy for me but will be hard for you.
11. They story here served mostly to set the fairy tale mood rather than be strictly engaging in its own right. Aurora, the titular Child of Light, is tasked w/ defeating an evil queen. In conquering this task, she meets a miscellany of companions who inevitably join her party and bring about the opportunity to do side quests. This is nothing groundbreaking but it works really well and never gets in the way.
12. The reason I say this feels like an adventure game more so than an RPG is just because the progression of the main plot is so strictly linear. You feel very much like you are wandering a single path much more than you are creating a presence in a world. It is a joy to wander this path but there is not much to do outside of it. This is all fine. It just doesn't feel like an RPG to me. (Sorry to talk about my feelings.)
13. Big developers and Ubisoft in particular sometimes struggle when they try for something smaller w/ a more immediate connection to the player like you often see in indie games but here I think they succeeded wildly. You would not know there was a huge studio behind Child of Light if there wasn't an enormously long roll of credits once the game was complete. There is a hand-crafted level of detail top to bottom and you cannot help but to get the sense this was a labor of love for those who made regardless of who they work for.
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