![child of light child of light](https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/public/field/image/2018/10/child-of-light-nintendo-switch.jpg)
And if you do very occasionally confuse which scene elements are obstructions or platforms the shear visual interest that this very analogue artstyle introduces makes it easy to forgive. Everything looks of a piece here - a single picture-book world through which you hop and swoop. It uses the UbiArt framework that recent Rayman games have championed, rendering the sidescrolling woodlands and caverns in a lush watercolour style that defies the visual compartmentalisation games usually undergo: platform, background, object, etc. Or the hapless jester who reliably sabotages dialogue with a duff rhyme, forcing other characters to tetchily correct her.Īnd it’s certainly gorgeous to look at. I particularly like a race of obsessively capitalist mice, who talk in city-slicker jargon about emerging markets and liquidity. Every line in the game is composed in verse, and though it often struggles with this remit, grasping at dubious not-quite-synonyms and mangling syntax for the sake of the rhyme-scheme, some of the writing is rather sharp. The story, which sees princess Aurora awake unexpectedly in a benighted fantasy land that may be a dream, the afterlife or something else, is told briskly and with some wit. It’s an adventurous and intelligently made game, I think, which tries to gussy up inherited JRPG combat mechanics in novel ways. That reluctance sort of surprised me, though, because I can see a lot in Child of Light to like.
![child of light child of light](https://www.nydailynews.com/resizer/5qGNxW5WMYkIdRAl6skYXrS5bSY=/1200x0/top/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/AP6LRXZBRSTTE2PLOJMC43HRTY.jpg)
Another being that, since I had to, I’d have preferred the cutscenes to be skippable. One feeling being a reluctance to play more of it than I really needed to. The one good thing about uPlay misplacing my save file several hours into Child of Light is that it helped bring my feelings about the game into sharper focus. I like all these things and yet it’s left me struggling to be enthused. You might call it a platformer too, but given that the heroine quickly sprouts wings, your exploration of the sidescrolling overworld is more aerobatic than acrobatic.
![child of light child of light](https://res.cloudinary.com/lmn/image/upload/c_limit,h_360,w_640/e_sharpen:100/f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/v1/gameskinny/a5f1209eac2dcee743221698c4848325.jpg)
Beneath this breezy fable of lost princesses and talking mice, however, is a complicated combat system that calls back to Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battles - a dense interplay of buffs, interrupts and attacks that injects a realtime element to otherwise turnbased fights. Painted in watercolour and written in verse, Child of Light is a charming, if superficially childish, fairytale RPG.