One Life Left: Child of Light

Child of Light is a platformer role-playing game that takes place in the fantastical world of Lemuria. You play as the young girl Aurora, an Austrian princess who wakes up to find herself in a strange world with even stranger creatures. Over the course of the game, you meet the different characters of Lemuria, from the mouse-like Populi to the circus-performing Aerostati, and befriend all of them. You learn that things are not quite right in this country and that the malevolent Queen of Night is keeping the people captive through the use of dark magic and evil minions. Aurora must fight her way through this strange world to save Lemuria and return to her ailing father. Along the way, Aurora learns that to be a good ruler, she must often put the needs of others above her own desires.

Ubisoft Montreal, a big name company in the gaming industry known mostly for the Assassin’s Creed series, released Child of Light in April 2014. However, Child of Light is a step in quite a different direction for the developer. The game showcases an absolutely stunning animated backdrop. All of the different environments were carefully hand drawn and scanned into the game. The player feels as though they are walking through a painting as they traverse the beautiful landscapes of Lemuria. The artists did a fantastic job making the game feel just like a child’s dream.

Over the course of the game Aurora must face many dark creatures and servants of the Queen of Night. Combat in Child of Light is time-based. At the bottom of the screen during an encounter there is a time bar which all of the characters move along depending on their speed statistic and the action they are about to take. This is not a common style among these types of games – most similar games use a simple turn-based mode. Compared to the combat style, the time-based system kept me more involved with each encounter. While I was waiting for Aurora and her party to move along the bar, I was busy trying to slow my opponents down and timing my hits to interrupt their attacks.

Another thing the developers did well with the combat was making characters compatible with each other. You are allowed to have two party members on the field at any given time during a fight. Over time, I found that certain characters worked especially well together. For example, my favorite team consisted of Aurora and her sister. Aurora’s sister Norah has abilities that slow down her enemies while speeding up her teammates. This allowed me to minimize the attacks of the enemy while allowing Aurora to bombard them with her spells and sword.

The best thing the game has going for it is the storyline and the way it is presented. The entire game is presented as a poem. All narration and dialogue within the game follows a rhyming scheme. This aspect of the game was not only beautiful, but also very entertaining at times. One of the characters has an inability to rhyme and is often corrected by the others with a word that fits the rhyming scheme. The main reason I enjoyed the poetic narrative is for its originality. I have never played another game that has used this style of storytelling and I they did an excellent job with it.

I only had two complaints with Child of Light. The first was that the levels could become a bit grindy. I found myself running from one battle to the next with the same enemies which could get a bit tiring at times. My second complaint was that the puzzles they presented you with were the same every time. You needed to open a door to the next area, used Igniculus the firefly to illuminate a few panels on the door and voilà – it opened. However, given that the game is only about 13 hours long, these were minor annoyances which didn’t add up to much in the end.

Overall, I give Child of Light a 9.5 out of 10. I immensely enjoyed this game for its engaging story, original narrative and engaging combat system. While the game could be a little bit of a grind at times, the feeling never lasted too long and new developments in the story followed soon after. If you are looking for a good, story-centric game to play in between exam weeks or to play through over the upcoming break, I highly recommend Child of Light and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.