Light Fall Review

There’s nothing like a good platformer, you can sit back and enjoy running and jumping across various platforms and obstacles. Add to that great visuals and a half decent story and you’ve got yourself a game with amazing potential. Light Fall puts you in control of a little shadow who has no idea who he is and is guided through his adventure by an owl.

As a small silhouette jumping between platforms you get to explore the beautiful landscape of Numbra, a wasteland of bottomless pits and fields of sharp rocks. To navigate this dark but pleasant landscape you need to avoid crystals scattered across the ground that kill you on impact. On top of that, progressing through the game will cause various enemies to spawn in and make your life difficult. In order to dodge the various obstacles on the map you must use the provided platforms to leap over and under crystal spikes or flying enemies bent on taking you down, and sometimes even throws some lasers at you which can kill you unless you create a platform to block them. Luckily the game doesn’t punish you too much with these obstacles, there are checkpoints scattered throughout the map that you will respawn at when you die.

To aid you in getting over and through these obstacles you gain the power to manipulate a little block known as the Shadow Core, which allows you to produce a floating brick that can be used to block laser beams, jump over platforms, or in some cases skip almost an entire level. The Core allows you to create up to four platforms, however you need to have set foot on normal ground in order to make more blocks after your fourth. While this may seem like a fun addition to the platforming genre it doesn’t really make the game feel any more fun and certainly feels less challenging. I found that at some points I could mindlessly build platforms while jumping high up in the air and skip a large portion of the map. While I’m sure people who actually want to play through each level properly won’t abuse this, I found it disappointing that there wasn’t any kind of penalty for playing like this. Perhaps if the game sensed you progressing through the levels far faster than you should, it could spawn in some aerial monster to force you back down to the ground.

Overall the graphics are mainly a mix of dark shades and jagged spikes. Most of the levels are comprised of outlines with the occasional brightly lit area with some pretty graphics to grab your focus, however it’s nothing new or spectacular that we haven't already seen in games like Ori and the Blind Forest. I definitely would have liked to have seen a bit more in terms of creativity when it came to the enemies on the map and even the pitfalls and spikes feel a bit uninspired.

The Game’s audio falls into the same sort of lull as the graphics in that the creators went for a simplistic approach that borders on simplistic. The main soundtrack is fairly calm unless you approach what the game considers a difficult area. The sound effects border on the most minimalistic I have heard in a platformer, you have the footsteps of your character and the sound effect of the Shadow Core blocks whenever you spawn them in. With games like Super Mario and Ori and the Blind forest, it’s the music and imagery that helps to create such a beautiful game with such a simple concept and I think that's where Light Fall drops the ball.

Overall Light Fall is a pretty enough game that attempts to add something extra to the platforming genre that does more to break the game than to help it. If the game had a way of punishing players for abusing the Shadow Core ability I would definitely say that the game could be a great challenge. Unfortunately it becomes too easy and tempting to just abuse the system when you come across a particularly challenging part of the level. Sound and graphics are both a little too minimalistic to the point where the entire game feels rather empty when compared to a game like Ori and the Blind Forest. I did enjoy my time playing Light Fall, however it just felt like going through the motions after the first few levels. Overall it has the potential to be an interesting twist on the platformer genre, but falls short due to the overall simplicity.