Child of Light (PC): Wait, Ubisoft made this? There must be something amiss.

Sometimes I need to trust my instincts better. This game showed up on the Playstation Store fairly early in the life cycle of me owning a PS4. It had a downloadable demo and a cute aesthetic to it. And the demo had a cool battle system. I thought was an interesting demo, but in my head I was like "That's not bad. If that comes out on the PS+ freebies I'll snag that one." It never did.

Almost 2 years finally passed and I realized I could get PSN cards from my gas station with points. So I did, fully prepared to pay the 15 dollars they were asking for it since it was summer and there weren't a lot of PS4 releases. But as I was doing this, the Steam summer sale happened, and I'll be damned if that very game didn't drop to 3 bucks. There was no reason not to jump on that deal. So I did. I took my sweet ass time getting to it, but now that I have I am glad that I did. 

CHILD OF LIGHT(PC)

The tale of Child of Light opens with a limerick telling us that in Austria, there is a place called Five Hills that is ruled by a beloved Duke, and his wife. They bore a daughter named Aurora, but while Aurora was still very young, her mother passed. The Duke raised Aurora alone, but was still very happy. He fell in love a 2nd time and remarried to a mysterious duchess. On the Friday before Easter however, Aurora went cold in her slumber and was found dead by morning. The Duke was utterly distraught and became bed ridden.

However, Aurora found herself waking up in a curious place called Lumeria. Thinking to be in a nightmare she is found by a firefly named Igniculus who guides her to an alter where a Sword lies. She frees the sword and challenges the guardian there and rescues and old sage who informs her Lumeria was once bright, but a dark queen named Umbra has take over and banished the light. She has a mirror that can return her home, but can only do so if she returns the light of the sun, moon and stars. Aurora is reluctant, but has no other choice.

Sounds kind of like a children's story book doesn't it? That is probably the most apt comparison for Child of Light when comparing most of the aspects of this game. Its entire design is meant to emulate that of the children's story book from the language, to the character and art design, the presentation, and honestly even how the story plays out. 

At it's heart the game is a JRPG. But I hesitate to rush the comparison because it blends a number of elements of different styles. For example, My brain wants to say it reminds me of classic Final Fantasy, but if I wanted to be accurate, it would say its more akin to the 2D MMO Maple Story. All of the maps are 2D sidescroller, but very early on you gain the ability to fly on the map, so it actually blows up the various locations pretty significantly. It sometimes suffers from invisible wall syndrome but it the maps never lock you in a box.

Enemies are scattered around the map so encounters aren't random, but you will need to do some minor grinding. This is where the game really shines because I loved this combat system. So you fight either alone or with a teammate and it follows your pretty typical timed battle system, but instead everyone shares the same wait bar. Depending on character or monster speed they move up the wait timer at varied rates, but when you reach 10% left you get to choose your action. This section of the timer is the Casting bar and your action affects your speed for the remainder of your wait before wailing with that attack or spell.

But this is where fights get interesting, because if you manage to attack an enemy when they are in the cast timer, they get interrupted and knocked back down the wait timer. So depending on your attacks and how fast they cast, you can constantly prevent your enemies from attacking you. However, this is a double edged sword because the enemies can do the very same thing to you, and nothing can swing the momentum of a fight than having one or both of your actions interrupted and allowing the rest of the baddies free shots at you.

This is where your firefly buddy comes into play. You can control him with the mouse, 2nd thumbstick, or additional controller (so yes, this could technically be played co-op). All he can do is fly around and flash but he is more useful than you think. In Battle, if you hold your flash on an enemy, it slows down his wait timer and allows you to play catch up, which can be incredibly handy in interrupting an enemy's attack. For many boss fights, this is pivotal. You can also use him to hover over one of your party members, and if you hold his flash on them, they recover a small amount of HP every second or so.

This is not infinite however, so on each battle you will find two plants with "wishes" on them. You can collect these to give your characters a small HP and MP boost, and completely refill Igniculus' flash. It forces you to be strategic about manipulating the time in your favor and using your free healing opportunities at the right moment to not be wasteful. In some of the boss fights proper time manipulation is almost a necessity because a poorly timed interruption can result in a massive chain that paralyze and damage you, allowing them to land even more free hits.

Inniculus' flash is also usable in the map as well. You can use him to stun enemies you pass to prevent them from harming you, or if you wait you can get behind them and set them up for a surprise attack. This usually will give one of your characters a free action to start, and your teammate not that far behind. It also can be used to collect hard to reach treasure chests and items that Aurora cannot reach on the map, and he is also used for a handful of locked door puzzles. 

So let's just get the biggest flaw of the game out of the way now, because its a pretty persistent issue and will probably turn a number of people off to the game. The prose in this game is not great. When you make the decision to do the entirety of the games story and dialog in limericks, you are truly handcuffing yourself to conversations that do not flow naturally.

In some cases it can get tiresome, but as people who watched me steam it noticed, there is a significant number of instances where they either use the same word twice to make it rhyme, or they use two words that sound similar but don't actually rhyme. I may be an English major, but I wasn't good at it and even I know that isn't how it works. The geniuses who write Critical Miss touched on this beautifully.

But if you can look past some of the rough prose in this game, almost everything else about it shines beautifully. I mentioned the art style emulates children's story books, which gives it a nice watercolor pallet that compliments the overall design. This also allows it to give you a pretty diverse cast of characters. Which might I add, has an insane number of characters for an RPG that plays as short as this one. On top of Aurora, other playable characters include Rubella the jester, Finn who is kind of a gnomish mage, Genovefa the.... lizard, swamp thing, and a massive daruma-like ogre called Oengus just to name a couple.

It's strange that the game gives me so many characters to pick from considering I can only have two in the party. You can switch them on the fly, and the game doesn't require you to have Aurora actually in the fray. But I tend to dump all my stat raising items onto the hero, so she seldom left the front line. And once I got Oengus, I basically was shredding through fights. But to be fair, all of the characters have pretty varied skill sets so you can use them as the situation arises.

In addition to each character having a pretty deep skill tree (generally 3 paths you can fill out), you also collect gemstones called occuli that give you various stat boosts. These can be combined to make bigger gems, or new types of gems. Once I realized that a diamond gave you an experience boost, I pretty much dumped everything into making a the largest diamond I could so I was raking in 25% bonus experience for Aurora all game. I also loaded her up with increased dodge when casting and high powered Light attacks (since little seems to be immune to light).

If you manipulate your crafting right, you can make something called a
Princess Stone. I never did, and it didn't seem to affect me finishing the game.

But out of everything that I loved about this game, I think the music is what hit me the hardest. The game's score was produced by the lovely and extremely talented Cœur de Pirate. Again fitting for the stage it has set, much of the game is accompanied by chime, flute, string, and piano melodies. Most of them are primarily a variant of the "Theme of Aurora" which pretty much had me hooked at the opening title screen, and this style worked well for me when I played Atelier Ayesha because the song was fresh in my head, so when it changed in feel to match the scene at hand, that subtle difference felt powerful.

And standing tall amongst the soundtrack to this game, is a song that didn't even get sold on the OST. The battle music is appropriate and there are various different battle tracks throughout the game, but there is one boss theme in particular that feels truly epic. I don't mean that in the slang,"holy shit that's awesome" style of epic. I mean how the orchestral music raises and falls, accompanied by an operatic chorus that remains uptempo. This song pretty much constantly kept the heart rate up and made each boss fight where I heard it feel truly important, and when they started to go bad, it felt that much better when I overcame it. I am a huge advocate of proper score to compliment a game and on this one Ubisoft nailed it.

Wait, Ubisoft? The same people who pump about a billion Assassin's Creed games? Far Cry, Rainbow Six and every other Tom Clancy game? I didn't believe it either. Ubisoft Montreal put this game together and asked famed Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to produce a promotional piece for the game that was equally gorgeous. Who would have thought they could break away from the Triple-A money generating machine to make something different and beautiful. Honestly, I was shocked. 

So if I have to nitpick some complaints about the game outside of the excessive use of limericks, it'd have to say I was disappointed by the length. It took me only 10 hours to level up to 50+ and completely shred to the ending. And after a bit of necessary questing, the game moves kinda breakneck to the finish basically skipping having one last final dungeon and tosses you into the final boss fight. To be honest I wasn't ready to leave that world yet. I wanted there to be more.

You get Rubella first. Her Tumble ability isn't strong, but her sheer speed and cast
time basically lets you control the timeline. She is an invaluable teammate.

They provide you a new game plus so you can play it again on a harder difficulty and keep your levels, items, and occuli but the game really doesn't change. So unless you love gathering collectibles (you weirdos), you probably won't feel the need to go through it a 2nd time soon. I tried to and inside a couple of fights I didn't really feel the need to continue. Gathering collectibles sucks.

And honestly, items in this game seem pretty pointless too. Throughout the adventure you will constantly find yourself picking up potions with various effects. Some restore health, magic, some cure status affects, boost your attack or defense, hasten you up the timeline, give you immunity to things. And every single one of them means exactly dick. Unless I needed to revive a party member (which happened rarely in my case), every other item in the game didn't seem as a important as knocking  a baddie down the timeline was to me. So for a large portion of the game, the items went completely unused.

At least Quicker and Bicker rhyme.

There is a degree of sidequesting to do in the game, but I hesitate to call it "sidequesting" since most of them seem to be able to be done as you continue on with the main story of the game. There were only a few of them I actually had to backtrack for, and only one them I actually missed (which would have given me another party member, but that dounk would have just ridden the bench anyways).

And this is nitpicky, but I wish I had a clearer explanation of the crafting system when I started because had I known I could use my small stones to make bigger stones, I wouldn't have wasted time mixing things early. I use 3 difference colored stones to make a diamond. I use 3 diamonds to make a bigger diamond. But had I known I coulda just mashed all my colored stones together to make bigger ones, I probably would have saved a lot more resources making big valuable stones faster.

But ultimately, as I said prior these are pretty nitpicky complaints to a game that I thoroughly enjoyed. To say I blew through this game wouldn't be an exaggeration. I played it in like 2 or 3 hour chunks but honestly if I probably could have smashed this game in a sitting if I had the day off. Everything about it kept me totally immersed in this world and I loved pretty much every moment of it.

To that regard, I am disappointed that I had waited so long to give this game its proper chance. Among a slew of mediocre reviews, lukewarm responses, and complaints about the language used I fell victim to hearsay instead of just getting it when I enjoyed the demo. I wish I had sooner. Child of Light isn't going to shatter the gaming industry and revolutionize how RPGs are played, but it gave me a wonderful 10 hours of a children's story to get lost in. It would have been nice to be my PS+ freebie, but it is absolutely worth the 15 bucks they are asking for it.

I wished I wasn't right about Norah...

Until Dawn (PS4): Making Wrong Decisions Right

*Blows dust off the blog* Oh hey old girl, how you been doing? No, No I haven't forgotten about you. What Laya? No, were just doing a video thing for Youtube is all.. No we're fine, seriously. Come on, quit being like this. It hasn't been that long, know how the summer months are for games. Baby quit being so crazy, can we just do the review please? Thank you.

So as its well documented, I love a good horror game. And as I have said recently, horror games have been on the uptick. Not all of them have been spectacular (See: The Evil Within) but at the very least its a trend I am happy to see. This game got teased at E3 last year, and it immediately grabbed my attention because it looked straight up like horror movie trailer. Needless to say I was excited. But then I watched a game play trailer and it reminded me of games I had less strong feelings for and kinda brought me back to earth. Still, the premise got me going so that was worth the purchase....

UNTIL DAWN (PS4)

Our tale begins with a group of 10 (Josh, Hannah, Beth, Sam, Mike, Jess, Emily, Matt, Ashley, and Chris) friends enjoying their winter getaway at Blackwood Mountain Ski Lodge. During a night of the revelry some of the group drinks to excess and are incapacitated (Chris and Josh). The others get together and decide to use Hannah's crush on Mike to prank her. Mike leaves a note to invite her up to his room, when she meets him, he talks her into taking off some of her clothes to which she willingly complies.

Sam, Hannah's best friend, didn't approve of the prank and tried to find her, but too late as she enters the room as the rest of them show they were hiding, cameras recording and giggling. Humiliated, Hannah rushes out of the lodge into the snowy mountain alone. Beth, Hannah and Josh's sister, catches only the aftermath of the group trying to find her, and infuriated by their prank sets off into the winter to try to find her sister alone.  Neither of them return.

One year later, Josh tries to rally everyone together to continue their tradition and bring everyone back to the lodge. This time meant to be a means of recovery, to try to give themselves a memorable trip and to help (him) get some closure to the tragedy of his sisters' disappearance. There is a great deal of reluctance, but the group gathers again to try to continue their winter fun. But it's very clear that this is uncomfortable for everyone.

Not a great start for me. The group of preps picking on the nerd at her own party?
Seriously, I was ready to make sure all of them died.

So alright, this seems to be pretty typical horror movie fanfare. A group of kids alone on a snowy mountain away from the rest of civilization? Sure, bet NOTHING is going to go wrong with that scenario. As you might imagine, some of the initial story I gave is probably leaving some information out. This is because the prologue to the game is basically the tutorial for the mechanics you need to know to play the game. So there are things you can do with success and failure, but I am not 100% sure if the prologue can affect the rest of the game or not, or if that is held to a single path until the meat of the game starts.

Until Dawn's biggest selling point is that this is a game that focuses strongly on the decisions you make and that path the story unfolds hinges strongly on every little decision you make. Alright, well I have heard that promise before with games like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Dragon Age, Fable, Infamous and the list continues to go on. But basically what they mean is moral choice: do you want to be the good guy, or the bad guy. That isn't as much the case in Until Dawn.

Sam can loosely be considered the game's protagonist as she seems to be portrayed as an
important character. But she does share screen time pretty evenly with the cast.

As you play through the game you are constantly confronted with little decisions as the narrative rolls on. Some of them are simply conversational decisions that affect your relationships to the other characters, some of the are decisions on what path you take, or how difficult the terrain might be, some of them are timed events where if you don't make a choice an alternative option plays out, and sometimes you have to keep the controller perfectly still. But what I like about Until Dawn is that these come up fairly often, so it didn't really afford me the opportunity to set the controller down and watch something play out. I had to be ready to make a choice.

In the examples I used above, I mentioned both Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain. If I had to decide on a game that this title most felt like, those two come to mind immediately. When I saw the gameplay video released before the game came out, it looked like it controlled in a very similar fashion to these interactive storytelling games that have come before it. I'd say it was an accurate assumption because its pretty much how these games control. Move your character around, interact with the interactables, make your choices, quick time events.

Sometimes you are faced with choices where you have to make a quick decision.
Sometimes there is no right answer, sometimes doing nothing is the way to go.
But it forces you to make instinctual decisions, and I appreciated that.

Yes, there are quick time events. It is annoying and has become somewhat a of a red flag on games. These will be the most common in scenes where you are climbing or being chased. But they also added a nifty one with the light bar which requires to you stay completely still. These I found to be the most difficult to do because even breathing too heavy made my fat belly move the controller enough to get caught. And sometimes when making a decision and there is a timer, you can chose to let it go for a 3rd option

And much like the two games mentioned before that, the controls still somehow manage to be shit. Seriously, is this just some kind of video game rule that I am not aware of that when you make a game that is motion captured by professional actors that the controls need to eat a bag of soggy dildos? This isn't a breakneck paced game, and its not even fast as the Last of Us which had some fantastic motion capture work. But if I am trying to walk down a dimly lit hallway while trying to control my flashlight in Until Dawn, then you can expect me to bang into the walls every step of the way because holding one direction is so finicky I've never been able to walk a straight line the whole game.

God, Jessica. Jessica is SO easy to hate in this game, but god damn it she has
probably the hands down best line in the entire game. You'll know when you hear it.

Thankfully, because of the nature of how you play the game, this isn't a game breaking factor. It's a mild annoyance at best and you can learn to ignore it if you get wrapped up in the story. And thankfully, the story is the best part. Unlike other "interactive storytelling experiences" that I have already mentioned before, this game does a very very good job of making sure its pacing and atmosphere keep pace like how you would expect it to in a traditional horror movie. Considering that this game runs anywhere from 7-10 hours that is actually pretty impressive. Horror movies need to feel oppressive to keep you on the edge of your seat, and to do that for that length of time is not easy.

What I didn't like, is they do they Alan Wake thing between chapters. "Previously on Until Dawn: here's some shit you did literally a few minutes ago". Its annoying because this game isn't long enough to need to remind me what shit that I literally just did. It worked in Final Fantasy 13-2 because its a long game and it reminds me of important points that happened much earlier. So the game either has a poor estimation of my memory, or thinks its not good enough to hold your attention the whole time and expects you to put it down. I understand not letting us skip the actual story elements, but we should have been able to skip this crap if we have been playing continuously.

In between chapters, you'll talk to Dr. Hill with all his creepy facial expressions.
He might be the most terrifying thing in the game. 

I thought the characters models in this game were incredibly appealing. Almost all of them, specifically the girls, had this unbelievably lifelike quality to them that in a lot of points made me feel like I was actually watching a movie in some scenes. So my brain initially thought, this must be motion captured. A correct assumption because not only was the game motion captured for all of the major characters, it also is backed by a handful of professional hollywood actors that appear in both movies and television.  So if people want to start pining that video games aren't a legitimate art from, guess what, you are still wrong. Because the people who contribute to the forms of are you have already accepted are starting to get onto the video game bandwagon.

My biggest question in this game is what is the replayability going to be like. Throughout the entirety of the game it keeps making references to the Butterfly Effect, and that every little decision you make affects the entire story as a whole. And maybe to a degree this is true, but the game notifies you by a flutter of butterflies in the corner when a decision you have made has effected the story. It seemed to happen often enough but I wonder if the game is designed in a way that certain characters can't die until certain points of the game.

For example, there are scenes in the game where you are given a choice when climbing a ledge. There are safe paths to take, and less safe paths. When I wasn't being chased or time wasn't a factor, I opted to choose the path that seemed safer. But if I was being rushed at these same points, I would take the riskier option to save time. Now, botching up one of these QTE's killed my character in one sequence, but I wonder if I were using one of the more important characters, would they just get hurt but the game would continue?

From what I can tell about how the game ended, from what I can see, the ending doesn't grossly change depending on the number of survivors that you get through to the end. I know there are endings where everyone dies and one where everyone survives, but from what I have read this hinges on collecting the right number of items along the playthough. This is kind of frustrating because collectible gathering can destroy the pace of a game like this. And that's a real problem since the pace in a horror movie or game is everything. Sure I can play them again to find all the collectibles, but if I know the story already how many times am I going to play it?

Most annoying of the collectibles are the Totems. When you find them they give you a brief glimpse of something that can happen later in the game depending on the choices you make. On one hand, "ok, cool mechanic". On the other, they are pretty much in game spoilers. If on my first playthrough I knew they wouldn't affect the ending? I would have just skipped getting them so I can be surprised.

The menus for all the clues you uncovered is very intuitive. But
exhausting and intimating. There is a lot of stuff you can miss.

In my first play through I did a pretty good job of keeping mostly everyone alive, having most of the cast make it almost to the end. but then I made some phenomenally bad choices that ended with a number of the cast members dying. Thankfully, the game allows you to pick back up at specific chapters so I was able to replay the last chapter to see how the situation could change. It also seems like doing this allows me maintain the collectibles I have so this might affect my ability to get the other endings.

So ultimately the question is, is it a fun game? I guess it depends on context. As a game is it fun? No, its basically a decisions making simulator in the vein of the usual "cinematic storytelling experience". And typically as far as gameplay goes these are lacking. But what it does right and where it earns its fun appeal is that it keeps you making regular decisions however minute at frequent intervals so you don't really have a moment just set down the controller and watch. From a simple bit of idle banter or a cheeky snowball fight, it keeps you making decisions so you have to be engaged. So on that front it succeeds were others in this genre fail.

I fucked up so many of these "don't move" scenes.

Did I like it? Fuck yeah I liked it. It had all the makings a great horror movie. You have some likeable protagonists, you have some hateable protagonists, you have some good twists in the story, you have some visceral gruesome horror. But more so than that, yes, it does have some replay to it. I have been talking with my roommate and some of my game night friends and its been incredibly interesting to hear how all of our games shook out differently, telling each other about the scenes we missed and giving us motivation to go back and try it the other way.

Look, let's call a spade a spade here. Until Dawn is not really a game. It is an interactive movie, but it's a really good interactive move and it gave me pretty much everything I want in a horror movie experience. I've played through the game once alone, halfway through with friends, and will probably play it again soon. That's at least 15-20 hours of play of the game, and that makes it worth 60 bucks in my book. Until Dawn was a unique and beautifully designed, and earns my recommendation. If you own a PS4, you should own Until Dawn.

I seriously didn't think Josh's face was real person's.