Time: Child of Light

"Child, tuck yourself in bed
And let me tell you a story
Of Lemuria, a long lost kingdom
And a girl born for glory."​

It's rare that I find a game that leaves me with a "my god that was a good game" sort of feeling. When I first bought this game, I thought that since it was rather cheap it wasn't going to be very promising. At this point in time, I would like to have a chat with Me from the past, smack him upside the head, and tell him to buy the goddamn game when it was released back in back in 2014

And I don't care if your PC is dogcrap Me from the past; go and buy it and play it.

Story and Characters:

The story for Child of Light seemed a bit childish at first, but as it started to unravel, it started to descend more and more into darkness. And if anyone knows me well, they know that the one thing that I eat up the most are dark and tragic stories. Child of Light certainly does all of this and more. The one thing I was a bit afraid of was how it would end and I can say that though the story doesn't have the grandest ending of all, it's at least satisfying.

In terms of characters, most are pretty dynamic. You have the standard antagonist, the sidekick, the optimist, the pessimist, and many others. The only thing I could say I did not like about the characters was the fact that one of them leaves the party about halfway through the game and turns coat. It's kind of like having your best friend play on your team, then they give you a hard kick to the groin, and decide to join the other guys because it turns out they were never with you.

Also, a small tidbit that may annoy you is that the grand majority of dialogue in this game is arranged into couplets, or lines that rhyme with every other line (e.g: a,b,a,b) which some may find a bit irritating.

Gameplay:

The gameplay for Child of Light is a semi turn-based RPG where it's a 2 vs 2-3 battle system. As towards outside of battle, it's pretty much a side-scrolling adventure similar to Paper Mario. Most of the gameplay gets a pass in my book, but if I had any issue with the gameplay, it's two things: the first is that unless you choose to play on expert mode, most of the battles, including boss battles, aren't much of a challenge. The second is that nearly every battle (unless you're fighting a severely low-level monster) gives you far too much experience, making you able to level up after nearly every battle. I suppose leveling up is a good thing, but when you level up so much that you swat enemies down by poking them, you get rather bored.

Art:

In the words of another reviewer of this game, "most of the background art for Child of Light looks like it could be hung in a museum." And he's certainly not wrong with that. Nearly every piece of art in this game looks like it was carefully crafted in order to make the game as beautiful as possible. If I could give it any sort of criticism, it'd be that the characters in battle use the same animations for when they're being attacked and when they're doing the attacking. Aside from that, the art certainly gets a pass.

Audio:

This is another category that Ubisoft managed to knock out of the park. Honestly, it would take me quite a while to pinpoint which track was my absolute favorite in this game. From the field music to the epic boss themes, I couldn't get enough of listening to it to the point that I sought them out on YouTube. Furthermore, the narration from time to time is also brilliantly done to give the player a fairy tale vibe that the developers intended.

The only bit of criticism that I can give this category is the fact that with the exception of the narration, all dialogue is read dialogue with absolutely no voice acting, which is an absolute shame since there are many voice actors and actresses that could've easily filled the boots.

Verdict:

This game most certainly obliterated my expectations. A game I thought would be reminiscent to a fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson was actually a deep and dark story akin to a game like Undertale. My only disappointment with this game is the fact that Ubisoft did little to market it, most likely severely overshadowed by bigger games by Ubisoft like the Assassin's Creed series. At the time of this review, this game can be bought on the cheap for under $4 on Steam for a week. So if you haven't bought this game yet, what in god's name are you waiting for?

And even when this game goes back up to its normal $15 next week, I still say it's well worth the money. Furthermore, I can only hope that Ubisoft takes a bit of a break from Assassin's Creed and starts investing a fair bit more time to developing games such as this.

I award this game with a very generous 8/10