My first impressions of Child of Light weren’t that great. I’d realised that week that I just don’t particularly get on with 2D platformers any more, and after half an hour of jumping around I was ready to give up after “the same old platforms and puzzles reared their ugly heads”.
But I’m glad I went back to it, because it actually turns out to be a fun little game.
Of course, really it’s not a platformer at all, it’s a 2D RPG, and soon after the point at which I initially gave up I received the gift of flight in the form of tiny fairy wings. This turned out to be a literal game changer, completely removing the need for leaping about – and it made the game much more fun as a result. By drifting lazily through the levels on my tiny wings, I had more space to appreciate the real beauty of the hand-drawn artwork in that game. And it really is a stunner. “A fairy-tale storybook come to life” is the phrase at the forefront of my mind – and in fact the game presents itself as a tale of a fantasy kingdom being retold.
Also, it has the best hair animation I’ve ever seen. Your tresses float along behind you as if carried on some invisible current, an effect that even drew coos of appreciation from the normally cynical Mrs Merriweather.
Speaking of Mrs Merriweather, she did enquire at one point why I was playing a “girl’s game”. I considered the evidence. Yes, I was controlling a princess with fairy wings. Yes, one of the members of my party was an adorably cute mouse called Robert with a tiny hunting bow. Yes, I had fabulous hair. Hmmm.
At that point I did what any red-blooded male would do under the circumstances… and berated her for her narrow-mindedness when it came to gender divisions. I am fully in touch with my feminine side, and it thinks that mouse is SO GODDAMNED CUTE I COULD JUST EAT IT ALL UP.
Ahem.
Going back to the game, it’s not all hairstyles over substance. The turn-based battle system is pretty nifty, with a well-implemented skill tree that had me carefully considering my strategy and play style as I chose which path to go down. The battle system itself relies on a meter that shows a ‘wait phase’ and an ‘attack phase’ – you can line up attacks at the beginning of the attack phase, but if you get hit between the start and the end of the attack phase, your attack is cancelled and your character gets pushed back down to the wait phase. Of course, you can inflict the same annoyance on enemies, too. It’s certainly not a new system – I’m certain I’ve played a game that used something like this before, possibly Skies of Arcadia – but it works really well.
One thing that doesn’t work well is the game’s insistence in presenting dialogue in tortuous rhyme. It raised a small smile at first, but then when the characters carried on speaking in rhyming couplets after the first few interactions I had the horrendous realisation that the designers intended to keep this up for the ENTIRE GAME. I wonder whether at any point, as the script writers were struggling to come up with yet another rhyme for an awkward word, they said to the person next to them: “Hey, maybe this rhyming thing was a bad idea? Maybe we should just, you know, stop?”
This was probably met with the rejoinder: “NO PHILIP! We’ve come so far, we can’t possibly stop now! I’M GOING TO SEE THIS THING THROUGH TO THE BITTER END, SO HELP ME GOD. Now, what’s a rhyme for ‘attack phase’?”
The game is also a little bit on the short side – roughly 10 hours or so. Reading online, this seems to have annoyed people who picked up the game for full price at launch, but as far as I’m concerned, the shorter the better. My precious gaming time is at a premium these days. (And it helps that I bought it on sale.)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some woodland creatures to level up.
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 