The Lost Light of Sisu

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

.

Review:

The Lost Light of Sisu is a Platformer released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2019. In this game, players take the role of a square-shaped alien searching planets for energy cubes to power their spaceship.

The presentation in this game is good, but nothing special. The game uses 2D visuals with some good animation, but much of the game’s visuals are simple and somewhat abstract, and a bit monotonous in appearance. These visuals are backed by a largely atmospheric soundtrack, with the plunky sounds of your character moving around and your character’s cutesy grunts when pushed by an obstacle tending to drown out the game’s music.

The gameplay premise in The Lost Light of Sisu is that each level starts with your character having a minimal set of abilities, just a simple jump and wall-jump. However, throughout each level as you acquire energy cubes, they bestow on your character various enhancements to your abilities, such as increased speed or jumping power. Using these enhancements, players must explore even further within each level until they can reach that level’s exit.

While having the player’s abilities reset with each new level might sound limiting, it actually gives the game’s designers free reign to create some clever levels, each requiring the player to seek out and find these cubes to increase their abilities in unique ways. One level may have you crossing a gap by getting a better jump, while another may increase your speed so you can cover more distance with your smaller jump. Add to this a variety of obstacles and differing elements in the game’s levels, and you have a game that occasionally has some really clever level design, and generally does a good job of mixing things up and keeping them interesting.

Another thing that this game does surprisingly well is providing players with a balanced challenge. Players only need to complete 10 out of every 20 levels in each area, so they can skip more difficult or troublesome areas if they prefer. Also, some of the platforming challenges that players need to tackle can be a bit tricky, but your character can’t really be damaged or die, so the worst setback you’re likely to experience is falling down in an area and working your way up again.

The exception to the balanced gameplay in the prior paragraph are this game’s “boss” stages, which really require players to have a certain level of skill to complete, cannot be skipped, and do have something akin to death, though restarting is easy enough, and these levels do have checkpoints. While more skilled players may relish the challenge that these levels provide, more casual players may find these levels to be a significant roadblock in their progress through the game.

Beyond this, the only other real complaints I have about The Lost Light of Sisu are that I suppose the controls do feel a little loose, and nothing this game does is truly ground-breaking. However, overall I feel that this game provides a mostly excellent Platforming challenge with some good level design and enough variety to keep things interesting. This isn’t likely to be your favorite Platformer ever, but if you enjoy Platformers, there’s a good chance that you’ll like this one.

tl;dr – The Lost Light of Sisu is a Platformer where players take the role of a square-shaped alien searching for energy cubes to power their spaceship. This game doesn’t do anything truly groundbreaking, but it is nevertheless a solid Platformer with some good level design and a generally good challenge level. If you’re a fan of the genre, this game is well worth a look.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}