I have started to notice a trend lately: hard as nails games are becoming more and more popular. Dark Souls-style games are starting to appear more frequently. It’s not a bad thing, since I enjoy a challenge. However, I still prefer to see developers take a risk to create something unique, to give their games personality, and stand on their own ground to avoid being labeled as another Dark Souls clone. Fall of Light: Darkness Edition tries to shake things up, bringing a game that had good ideas but that falls a little short in what it tries to accomplish.
Fall of Light tells the tale of Nyx, an old warrior in a world devoid of light, who starts a dangerous journey to bring his daughter Aether to the last place where the sun shines. She is an “Indigo” child who radiates luminescence, like Luce the goddess who brought life to the world. The world is in darkness due to a certain magician with intolerance to sunlight (or something) and plunged the world in the first era of darkness. The story unfolds as you progress through, and it’s not bad. There is a lot to see and different weapons to try. Also, Aether is not just for show, since being close to her powers you up.
Now, my main concern here lies with several ideas used that on paper sounded good, but in execution weren’t. Let’s start with combat. Depending on your currently equipped weapon, you have access to a weak and strong attack. I like that there is a good variety of weapons to use, but you are left to choose ranged weapons (when you get access to them later on the game) to be able to survive the many enemies and dangers. The problem here is how clunky the controls feel, since there were times in which I was pressing R button for weak attack and nothing happened. It happened so often that I went as far as thinking that my joycons were malfunctioning.
Another thing that hinders the experience is the stamina. Every action like attacking, defending, and evading uses stamina, so it’s not like you can hack ‘n slash your way through enemies. If you deplete it, you are a sitting duck. I get that it was brought in order to balance the game, but you feel a lot of the time that the odds are against you more that necessary. Even when locking on to enemies by pressing the right stick evading and attacking them sometimes whiff, you are subject to punishes a lot of the time unforgiving. For example, on the first boss-like encounter, you fight against a flame-armored clad enemy who uses magic. If you attack and leave enough stamina for a roll, he will get in a position in which fireballs fall from the sky, requiring you to dodge them. Since your walking speed is slow and you must wait for the stamina gauge to refill to do another one, you are often struck by the fireballs. If you are unlucky enough to be hit by one, your characters falls and there another missed opportunity is evident: no matter how quickly you press the buttons, no matter how much stamina you have, you just need to patiently wait to die, or hope that you can endure the attacks long enough so your character stands again. This makes the game so frustrating and hard, not because of the difficulty level (on normal it is brutal, I don’t want to imagine anything higher), but for the lack of options given to give you a fighting chance
You get a talisman that can heal you, and you can use to transform into a creature of darkness. The conditions for using it mean that you have to defeat enemies, and then the talisman absorbs darkness. Once a gauge is full, you get a square up to three ,but due to the problems mentioned above, it’s hard to see it as a viable option, rven when faced against enemies with blunt weapons that can take four or more points of life with a single hit.
Another problem is that Aether doesn’t serve any purpose besides giving you more trouble. While it’s true that being close to her powers, you up and your weapons. When you die, she does as well, and you are tasked to find her ashes (found close were you died) and revive her. One thing I did is to clean up the enemies on the area and then revive her. A lot of times I had to backtrack to rescue her since she is prone to being captured. Pressing Y tells her to wait in a set place ( ind of RE4 but not quite), but I noticed that as I moved she was still following me, getting killed in the process and throwing to the garbage what I tried to accomplish. Holding down Y has you grabbing her hand and giving some control to where you can move both characters, but honestly for me, this serves no purpose since you can’t attack or anything.
Graphically. Fall of Light looks good. I noticed a little screen tearing on portable mode, but on TV mode, I felt the game looks kind of dark. It’s not game breaking, since you can use a lamp that you get early on the game. The enemies are varied, and the music is dark and moody.
Bottom Line – Fall of Light: Darkness Edition is a good idea that suffers from poor controls and design choices. If you like hard games and do not mind the control issues, there is fun to be had but if not is better to leave this world in darkness.