Final Light: The Prison

Genre: Metroidvania

Players: 1

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Review:

Final Light: The Prison is a Metroidvania… or at least so I’m to understand. I’ll be honest with you, I couldn’t stand this game, and since one of the key features of Metroidvanias is returning to older areas with new abilities that open up your options for exploration, I didn’t bother with this game long enough to see this play out.

Yeah, this is the advantage of being a reviewer who openly states that I don’t play a game to completion, I only play it long enough to get a good feel for the game – if a game is just clearly bad, I don’t have to bother with it any further. And hey, maybe the game gets better later on, though i honestly don’t see how it could, given what I played.

The premise of this game is that you’re entering a nasty prison of tortured souls with the goal of freeing those souls, evidently by killing them. Exactly who you are and what the deal is with your bizarre double-bladed outfit doesn’t seem to come up as far as I can tell, and honestly it’s just as well – the story here seems to have been conveyed by someone with a weak grasp of the English language.

The game’s graphics and sound are a mixed bag. There are elements here that seem like they might have been nice in another context, but they’ve been cobbled together in a way that isn’t all that sensible or cohesive, and those few nice elements are outweighed by the ugly – ugly environments, terrible animations, and largely terrible and repetitive music, title screen music notwithstanding (which I would bet anything is some public domain song randomly jammed into the game).

All of this would be forgivable if the gameplay were good, but here you have a blend of unresponsive and janky controls, terrible button-mashy combat, and absurd load times.

Thus far, every game I’ve given an F has been a broken game – something about the game made it for all intents and purposes unplayable by anyone who values their time and sanity. Final Light: The Prison is not broken, it technically works, but it is so repulsive, so lacking in good gameplay, so lacking in any cohesive artistic vision, so lacking in any redeeming qualities that I simply can’t see a reason that anyone should bother with it. I found trying to play this game to be torturous, and I cannot recommend that anyone else endure such torture.

tl;dr – Final Light: The Prison is a Metroidvania that is a terrible mess of unresponsive controls, excruciating load times, and a cobbled-together presentation that doesn’t have any good qualities I can point to. Do not buy this game.

Grade: F

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