Flood of Light

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Flood of Light is a Puzzle-Platformer released on PC in 2017 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2018. This game has you playing as a young woman who can absorb energy and relocate it, and must use this ability to power devices to lower the water level that’s flooding a city.

The presentation here is fairly minimal, but still quite nice, with hand-drawn 2D visuals that make good use of color and light to paint a stark picture of a dark world you’re literally bringing light to, with the game’s quiet piano soundtrack setting a fittingly somber mood. The result is really quite nice.

As calm and contemplative as this game’s atmosphere is, I wish I could say the same about the gameplay, but often I was just left feeling frustrated. At first, this game seems simple – absorb lights and put them in other places to power machines to move forward. Shortly into the game you’re introduced to multiple colors of light, which must be treated differently.

However, there are multiple problems. Firstly, the controls here are not great. Players move around their character with an agonizingly slow pace, and must connect the lights to this character. Unfortunately, sending lights out from this character requires first directing a cursor to the character and then dragging it outward, a tedious and unnecessary process. The game does include touchscreen controls and gyroscopic motion controls, but the former is apparently incomplete and not especially helpful, and the latter just moves your cursor and isn’t especially helpful either (and in fact, you may want to shut it off so it doesn’t interfere with you using the analog stick to do the same thing).

Another issue here is that this game’s rules are not properly explained to the player, such as the inability to absorb only one light from a group, the need to chain lights outward to separate them, and the way blue lights apparently “infect” yellow ones and irreversibly change their color.

This would be frustrating on its own, but this game makes things worse by having inconsistent rules. In one puzzle, you could redirect multiple lights out of your reach independent of your character… a skill you often don’t have. In another, you are not allowed to go back to the previous puzzle to retrieve more lights, something the previous puzzle required in order to progress. I feel like, if the game isn’t going to communicate its rules to the player, it should at least be consistent with those rules.

It’s a shame Flood of Light has such maddening frustrating elements built into its gameplay, because the quiet, somber mood it creates is wonderful, and its $5 price tag is enticing. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel like this Puzzle-Platformer breaks some fundamental rules of puzzle design, and as a result I can’t recommend it to any but the most patient of puzzle-lovers.

tl;dr – Flood of Light is an atmospheric Puzzle-Platformer that has players moving a girl through a city and redirecting power to make the flooding waters recede. This game has a wonderful atmosphere, but it’s controls are far too tedious and frustrating, and its puzzle design too poorly-communicated and inconsistent. Unless you have a wealth of patience, this game should be avoided.

Grade: C-

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