EDIT 19/01/2019: Since writing this review I've discovered (thanks to a run at the ever excellent AGDQ) Light Fall has undergone extensive patching and alteration. In many cases these alterations directly effect and potentially improve areas of the game with which I took the most issue (for example boss battles, in particular the final boss, and platforming segments that restrict your use of your powers). I don't have any intention currently to revisit Light Fall for the sake of updating this review but it seems to me that thoughtful and sensible changes have potentially been made that I believe may improve the overall impression the game makes on first time players. With that in mind whilst I believe this review is still a valid snapshot of my experience with Light Fall at launch it should be taken with a pinch of salt, as the current version of the game is something slightly different in potentially very significant ways.
At its best this free-flowing platformer can be at once novel, exhilarating and immensely satisfying, at its worst utterly infuriating. Unfortunately, that’s a downside which comes to the fore all too often.
Light Fall places you into the role of an amnesiac (hey it’s a video game, what are you gonna do?) sprite navigating a charmingly silhouetted game world under the narrative guidance of a curmudgeonly owl, firstly to regain your memories and latterly to (spoiler alert, I guess) save the world (again, it’s a video game) from, well, something. It’s a largely inconsequential and borderline incoherent story that still somehow manages to be predictable despite making little sense at times.
Navigating this gorgeous world takes the form of a masocore-esque platformer wherein the focus is aimed towards the avoidance of fiendishly designed spike traps, pitfalls and screen filling bosses. The novelty of Light Fall lies not in this structure however but in your ability to summon a square platform at will; either under your feet when in the air or hovering near you on the ground. In the air these platforms act as a double, triple even quadruple jump before you have to hit the ground again and reset its charges.
In practice this mechanic gives Light Fall its greatest moments. Simply put, sprinting at full speed through the gorgeous 2D scenery and jumping freely through the air is exhilarating. Maybe you clear a spike trap as if it wasn’t there, maybe you skirt underneath a platforming puzzle - just a hairs breadth from tumbling into a bottomless pit, maybe you dive into a new area at a full sprint and just manage to overcome a segment of the game by the skin of your teeth – at full speed Light Fall is a marvel. It’s a glorious, breathless approach to platforming.
There’s a ‘proper’ route to get through each segment but with the ability to create footholds at your fingertips the possibilities for overcoming each problem in your path are legion, and that is part pf the joyful genius of Light Fall. I found myself honestly laughing out loud in delight as I swerved around the games early levels, extracting a madcap glee from sprinting forward into the unknown and somehow surviving or, more frequently, dying horribly and garnering just enough knowledge to make my next run that bit more successful.
That dying though reveals Light Fall’s first great flaw. Too often death in Light Fall simply reverses too much progress, checkpoints fall too few and far between and frequently I found myself frustratedly replaying longer segments again and again, only to fall to a new obstacle with the next checkpoint agonisingly in sight. The freeform nature of your movement can hurt the game here too; more than once I discovered that in navigating the level in one way I missed a checkpoint entirely and any failure became all the more frustrating. There’s little fun to be had in having to repeatedly replay a section you’ve already mastered because it’s followed by a disproportionally difficult segment, nor is there much fun in having to actively run for 10 or 20 seconds to even reach those sections in the first place. Every. Single. Time.
This would be more tolerable if more of Light Fall was played at the breakneck pace of the early game, but increasingly the more demanding platforming that the game lays on eschews that fast-paced nature for deliberate precision and that’s where the whole house of cards comes crashing down. When in the air a platform is placed directly under your feet as you jump, however on the ground placing a block means your character is locked in place as you move the platform through space, perhaps to interrupt the path of a naturally occurring laser beam in the environment (erm… it’s a video game?). The act of placing a block feels painfully slow compared to the momentum of the rest of the game and requires too many button presses in a way that makes it even more difficult to perform at pace further sapping momentum and, by extension, fun from the overall experience.
Unfortunately the deeper one gets into Light Fall the more the puzzles seem to shy away from the freewheeling fun of the early game and towards that slow, cumbersome platforming model, later puzzles even taking your platform building powers away in certain segments, but never quite creating compelling enough puzzles to make up for the loss of the game’s core mechanic. These sections in particular also lay bare the inadequacy of the checkpointing in Light Fall – successfully navigate a long and complex section after umpteen attempts to finally collect a story centric object and unfortunately die in doing the whole section backwards to reach the hub of that particular level again? Oops you’re back where you started and you have to go and collect that item all over again. Fuck you, Light Fall.
All of this culminates in a final boss that had me as close as I’ve ever been in my videogaming life to throwing a controller across a room (those ‘joy-cons’ feel like great little missiles, just the perfect size and weight to do irreparable damage to my TV screen). It’s a battle that embraces everything bad about the game, never letting you get up any momentum during the process, giving you imprecise targets and taking comfortably a full 20 (twenty!) seconds between respawning and reaching the boss again, discarding the first rule of the masocore platformer – failure is frequent but death is fleeting.
Once that seriously terrible final boss is out of the way Light Fall continues to display a remarkable dichotomy in its remaining game modes. Hard mode allows you to reattempt levels with more obstacles but critically with all of the already slightly sparse checkpoints stripped out of the levels. Replaying levels that you’ve come to know with a more complex obstacle layout might hold some value, but the removal of checkpoints makes the mode a joyless grind as you chip away at levels that were already fairly long by masocore standards with a ‘one-life’ stipulation.
On the other hand Speedrun mode made me fall back in love with Light Fall in a way that made me really struggle with the score that I ended up giving the game. In speedrun mode you simply tear through a level as fast as you possibly can and the game records your time for each level to a leader board. In and of itself this isn’t anything particularly special but Light Fall incorporates the brilliant feature of allowing the ghosts characters of the top players on the leader board to show in your game. These ghosts simultaneously introduce a new target for you to aspire to, turning levels into a sort of race, and serve to teach you the fastest routes through levels that top-level players of the game have discovered. There’s genuine fun to be had in chasing a ghost through a level at 100 miles an hour, seeing how they get around the roadblocks that originally stymied you. For a game that’s most enjoyable at pace speedrun mode feels like a brilliant addition.
So that’s Light Fall – neatly summed up by the two modes that let you replay the game. One a crippling, slow and joyless grind, the other a relentlessly fast paced and innovative platforming tour-de-force. The truth is that the game exists somewhere between these two extremes. It’s just unfortunate that all too often Light Fall lets its bad side come to the fore.