Child of Light (Xbox ONE)

Another one of those discount purchases brought me face to face with the genre that got me seriously into gaming in the first place.

Child of Light is an RPG which follows the story of Aurora, an Austrian Princess who falls into a coma and enters the world of Lemuria which is being consumed by darkness because of some crazy evil queen. That’s all I will say about the story though as it’s the main driver and reason for playing the game.

Looks wise, it’s basically a cartoon fairytale with eerie music that matches your surroundings. It is great for creating the kind of immersion needed for such a story driven game. One more thing I will say about the story is that it goes back to the roots of RPGs where you have to read dialogue rather than it being given to you in over-the-top, unskippable cut scenes. This was a nice change of pace and actually got me to invest more in the characters and story that usual. The other unique thing about the story is that the dialogue is delivered completely in rhyme which must have been quite challenging considering its a twelve to fifteen hour game.

The gameplay consists of semi-random encounter combat where the enemies are visible in the game environment and can be avoided after a certain point in the game. This will be detriment though because when you get to the non-optional boss fights, you will get owned.

Levelling up consists of each individual character having their own skill tree which develops to gain new combat abilities and get better attributes. All characters gain experience from combat so you don’t need to worry about constantly switching party members to gain experience.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

Only eight of the achievements are earned by following the story but the majority of them can be grabbed on your way to completing the game. The ones that aren’t storyline related are quite easily obtained with a few exceptions. Even the collectible achievements are very forgiving. For example, there are loads of chests scattered throughout the world but you only need to collect thirty of them for the achievement. In addition, you only need to collect 5 stardusts for another collectible achievement.

Completing the side quests is the only real time consuming thing away from the main story and for an RPG, it’s a short game so doing them is almost necessary to get your money’s worth. One of these brings back memories of Zelda as you have to take one item and trade it continuously until you get some gold. In Zelda it was a glass bottle but the principle is the same.

Of the 27 achievements, only two of them pose any real issues. The first of these involves having to interrupt three enemies at the same time. This can be quite frustrating as you have to use an ability that targets all three enemies and it has to hit when all three are in the interruption zone. This is exceptionally annoying if your ability only hits two of the enemies and random chance makes you miss the third one.

The last one I unlocked was the harder collectible achievement for getting all of the confessions. These are pieces of paper that flutter on the wind. There are only sixteen of them but the fact you have to collect all of them required me to do some playing after completing the main story. The world isn’t massive though so this wasn’t too onerous.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Child of Light offers a unique role playing game experience. The dialogue is well delivered and the combat is well structured. On a side note, I’m not sure if this was just many years of RPG experience but I never actually died on my playthrough and seemed to handle the boss fights at the correct level. This is brilliant as there was no need for me to level grind to get the most out of the story. It highlights how short the game is as I managed to get to the end only having fought 100 battles. That shouldn’t take anything away from it though.