➤ The Fall of Light review 🎮

There is an extremely tenuous limit that divides quotationism from copying. Cinematographically speaking, the idea is unanimous that no one has ever been able to kidnap and amalgamate the most disparate situations better than Quentin Tarantino has been doing for twenty-five years. Within the videogame industry, on the other hand, what we tend to recover as much as possible in recent years is the "difficult" RPG setting that Miyazaki and From Software have made great with the various Souls and the spin off Bloodborne. The talented Spanish team RuneHeads in turn takes another big step, inserting in this quotation soup a mechanic similar to that of Ico, called to carry the ball and chain around Yorda. This choice inexorably leads to the double consequence of raising Fall of Light to a highly inspired title, but risking in equal measure to brutally sink it.

Good and Evil: Light and Pain

The narrative assumption from which Fall of Light starts is certainly not among the most original. In a world where there is light and darkness, we are called to live the fourteenth era of men, the first dark, arrived after thirteen cycles of peace and prosperity. Already the intro represents a tribute to the opening scenes of the various Dark Souls, complete with a narrator and relative acting, which masterfully recall the narrative voice that a year and a half ago had introduced us to Lothric and the dormant flames. Once the setting has been assimilated, what you will find before you will be nothing more than the struggle of a father who ardently tries to save his daughter Aether, in order to bring his world back to light. We are not going to tell you more than what you might discover or deduce with the first few minutes of the game, this for the simple reason that Fall of Light owes so much to its ability to effectively tell the story: also borrowed from the titles of From Software, is divided into a few dubbed scenes and a myriad of documents to be recovered around, useful to fully understand the background of the world in which we live and to instill the right curiosity, at least up to a turning point that will put a second floor on the plate. narrative. It will be up to you to discover these elements, reassuring you that if Fall of Light can be said to be substantially successful, it is precisely under the narrative aspect. The initially inconsistent and pretentious relationship between Nyx and Aether will soon turn into the main reason for your trip. What unfortunately works less is everything that instead has to do with mere gameplay: between shortcomings and only sketchy mechanics, the total independence of the product has radically undermined its success.

Dark Souls/Diablo - Diablo/Dark Souls - ICO

What is truly strange is not the excruciating need to carry the ballast named Aether with us as we try to clear the rooms and corridors of dozens and dozens of enemies. The real downside to Fall of Light lies in the choice of an isometric setting a la Diablo. If, as mentioned before, you will be able to wait for the relationship between father and daughter to take shape and justify some bitter tears, it will be impossible to digest a combat system that hopelessly tries to trace the situations that made Hidetaka Miyazaki great, but that an isometric view tends to often render incomprehensible. What makes Dark Souls combat the current yardstick for the genre is its incredible accuracy and ability to return on-hit feedback that borders on miracle. This peculiarity is what overshadowed any other Souls like arrived in the following years (with the sole exception of Team Ninja's masterful NiOh). Finding yourself therefore fighting with a view so far from your alter ego, but which requires a precision of movement and superfine counterattack, is what the game has to offer the most unbearable. The limited availability in terms of inventory and the total absence of the characteristics of your opponent - even if only the vital bar - only accentuate a sense of frustration that will often risk making even the most hardened of players give up. In itself this would not be a problem, but only an additional stimulus:

what does not work is that this difficulty is often artificial due to some design choices that are not exactly happy, albeit dictated by a rather noble basic idea. Thus, combining everything with an artificial intelligence far from the memorable, Fall of Light turns out to be a discreet conceptual work, unfortunately achieved by making compromises perhaps greater than necessary. and that he is unable to make that leap that would allow him to dramatically expand his catchment area. Making a comparison with another atypical Souls Like that responds to the name of Salt & Sanctuary, the latter had succeeded in adapting the formula to a two-dimensional world, leaving aside the deeply forgettable narrative. Between swords, broadswords, axes, halberds, crossbows and company, Fall of Light will put in front of you a decent arsenal among which you can (and always have to) choose, leaving the growth of the character and their statistics to the accumulation of a quantity of souls left on the field by defeated enemies. Once the appropriate bar has been filled, it will be possible to go to pray with Aether at an altar (which takes the place of the bonfires, however present in Fall of Light) and also increase your amount of life points at the same time. The lack of weapon statistics, except for the specific abilities that each one is able to attribute to you, makes everything more difficult to understand, even if it makes it easier and painless to give up a previously obtained weapon. To all this is added the peculiarity given by the presence of the same Aether, which close to you will activate a buff of characteristics easily recognizable by an aura generated around your weapon. The characteristics are closed by the girl's possibility of dying and being kidnapped, with the consequent need to search for her (locked up in a cage) in the meanders of the area you were crossing.

Beauty in a few polygons

Fall of Light is a title that makes self-production a possible weakness, but also its expressive strength. The visual aspect of the title of RuneHeads is certainly not synonymous with high definition textures and striking polygonal models, but the choice to make the game in low poly, accompanied by the isometric view and far from the action, allow Fall of Light to offer some interesting and well inspired glimpses, even if the overall quality is often subdued and bares little care for setting details. Going on with the adventure, in the handful of hours that will be required to get to the credits, different environments will tear you away more than a smile of satisfaction, thanks to a love of the developers that transpires at every step (and that is the which is really important for a production of this type). The optimization is good, and the game does not suffer from any problems whatsoever, practically always reaching its sixty frames per second, apart from some sporadic emergency situations. The audio sector, on the other hand, is not particularly memorable.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Operating system: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i7 7700
Memory: 16 GB of RAM
Scheda video: GeForce GTX1070 8GB VRAM

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Windows 7/8 / 8.1 / 10
Processor: Intel Core i3 or higher
Memory: 4 GB of RAM
Scheda video: GeForce GTX560 Ti 1GB VRAM o superiore
DirectX: 11 version
Memory: 1 GB of available space

Recommended Requirements

Recommended DOES NOT EXIST ON STEAM

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Fall of Light is a discreet experiment created by the Spanish duo RuneHeads. What makes the title particularly inspired is also what unfortunately penalizes it: this is how the mechanics and the desire to mention Dark Souls and ICO, if on the one hand make it possible to enjoy a cryptic but pleasant narration, on the other. they do not marry with an aesthetic choice that places it closer to a Diablo, albeit without sharing with this anything other than the isometric camera. A decent starting point for a study that could give us some greater satisfaction in the future, perhaps having a higher team and budget available