While it may sound like a bit of marketing fluff, Child of Light - a role-playing adventure from the team behind Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 3 - really can best be described as an interactive fairy tale.
It tells the story of Aurora, the daughter of an Austrian Duke who falls ill and finds herself dreaming of a magical land called Lemuria.
Like any good fairy tale, there is a hazy blending of what is magical and what is real, with both elements in service of the story's themes. Child of Light draws from the classics for its theme, as the coming of age story for a princess whose mother has passed away and whose father remarried.
However, there is also a subversion of those fairy tale tropes as Aurora's growth is more intrinsically inspired, without any princes, charming or otherwise, in sight. The fairy tale aesthetic in Child of Light runs deep, from its hand-painted storybook visuals to the voiced narration that shows up at pivotal moments with the soothing tone of a mother reading her child a bedtime story.
Perhaps one of the most interesting quirks in Child of Light is its dialogue, which is presented entirely through poems. Specifically, the dialogue is a series of quatrain ballads and rhyming couplets, drawing on the rich tradition of ballad poetry for conveying folk and fairy tales.
Writing an entire 10+ hour game in verse is a tremendous undertaking, and the writers deserve immense praise for the dialogue being as successful as it is.
However, when attempting something so bold as writing an entire game in verse, it needs to be impeccable or every mistake will stand out all the more.
On that note, the metre isn't always quite right for a ballad, which isn't just a concern for poetry sticklers since these inconsistent lines tend to have a jarring effect on the dialogue's rhythm that draws attention to itself.
These incongruous lines are by far the exception though, and for most of Child of Light the character banter is a delight to watch as the conversations build each new poem. Child of Light isn't just an adventure game though, and despite its aesthetics resembling a bedtime story, it also has deeply strategic combat inspired by classic Japanese role-playing games that you wouldn't want to play while half-asleep in bed.
Combat revolves around the timing of your attacks every bit as much as the strength of your characters.
Both your party and your foes will scroll along a timing bar at the bottom of the screen, with your own characters and the enemies scrolling at different speeds to determine the turn order.
And when it is your character's turn in battle, each attack and spell will have a different charge time before it can be unleashed. Attacks that take longer to charge are generally more powerful, but getting hit mid-charge will interrupt your turn and send that character backward on the timing bar.
It is a combat system that has its origins in the classic Grandia series, a series often revered for its puzzle-like tactics for cancelling enemy attacks and gaining the upper hand. Child of Light maintains that satisfying strategic edge bringing tension to every encounter, perhaps more tension than its inspiration even since it drops the number of characters you can use in combat down to just two at a time.
With only two characters in battle against groups of two or three, Child of Light finds interesting ways to compensate for what could have put players at a disadvantage.
Players can swap out characters at any time during battle from a cast that becomes quite extensive by the game's finale.
There is no penalty for swapping characters mid-battle, so players are encouraged to experiment with different combinations and discover new strategies through their character pairings.
Players can still be outnumbered even with the flexible character swapping though, so Child of Light gives players access to Igniculus, a firefly which players can move around freely during combat to either slow down enemies or heal allies with a bright blast of light. Igniculus has a limited amount of energy, which can be refilled by flying it over glowing plants on the battlefield, so it becomes an interesting tactical trade-off between hindering your opponent or healing your allies.
As a bonus, if you have a second controller then another player can control Igniculus separately. Drawing again on the fairy tale aesthetic, this light co-operative option would be ideal for sharing the game's story with someone in a way that mimics the interaction between audience and an oral storyteller.
Admittedly, Igniculus isn't the most interesting role to play on its own, but the firefly comes into play outside of combat too, as a way to find secret treasures, light Aurora's way through dark caves and stun enemies before combat for a slight advantage. Child of Light gets off to a very quick start, with Aurora and her companions levelling up after nearly every battle in the first few hours.
And while accelerated character progression would normally indicate developers trying to compensate for a shorter adventure, Child of Light simply extends the character skill trees as the adventure goes on rather than truncate the narrative.
Saving the best for last, Child of Light is an absolutely gorgeous game to behold.
The UbiArt Framework that powered Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends is put to excellent use, allowing for hand-painted watercolour landscapes to make the world of Lumeria feel like an interactive canvas. There is such a great attention to detail in the visual design, right down to Aurora and characters from the 'real' world modelled in 3D while Lemuria's natives are 2D characters in order to subtly reinforce the rift between worlds.
The visuals are supported by a beautiful soundtrack that both builds with the energy of combat and mellows with the awed exploration of Lemuria's fantasy world. Child of Light is very confident in its artistic vision, and for good reason.
Its few missteps, like the occasionally awkward lines of dialogue, come about as a result of its ambition and dedication to creating an interactive fairy tale rounded out with an intricate and satisfying combat system.
It is a blending of genre and style that is an unexpected treat, and already one of the year's role-playing game highlights.
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