The Lightbringer by developer Rock Square Thunder and publisher Zordix Publishing—Nintendo Switch review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
If there’s one thing that I’ve come to appreciate over the years it’s the variety of high impact adventures alongside the more low-key and relaxing ones. The Lightbringer by Rock Square Thunder falls squarely into this latter category creating a fun and easy to get into bite sized adventure perfect for winding down at the end of the day or over the weekend.
People, because of course we did, made a mess of things and with the guidance of your sister, it’s up to you to remove the corruption that’s accumulated on the monoliths that used to bring light to the world. It’s a premise that has been used many times before but it’s an easy one to put into place in order to get the adventure going. Set up in a series of bite-sized stages, there are several “worlds” to explore as you find the light shards required in order to purge the corruption from each stage's monolith.
Each bite sized stage will take up to no more than about ten to twenty minutes all depending on how far out of your way you go in order to collect both the light shards and the other collectibles. Built as a puzzle platformer, I appreciated that you could move the camera around as while running and jumping in certain angles were much easier than others. It's a personal preference but having this option is huge at times.
The other reason that I appreciated being able to move the camera around is some puzzles require you to really look around to figure out where to go and sometimes all this would take is to remember to actually look around. Not everything will always be in view and maybe just by moving your camera view to the left or the right you’ll see that there’s another ledge, or, you’ll notice there’s no floor and jumping over that ledge would lead to jumping off the stage. I may or may not have done that several times before it “looked” like the floor continued and it did, just not in the one spot where I jumped which I could then see after rotating my camera slightly.
Other than running and jumping around though, the rest of the puzzle elements are kept simple enough and are never overly complicated as titles nowadays tend to get. Moving boxes or pushing levers is done by simply moving into them, there’s no need to press and hold a button or mash at a controller button to move it forward. It’s one less thing to think about when running around collecting light shards or perhaps the gear to make the levers move.
Even combat for the most part is simple enough. Equipped with a boomerang instead of a sword as your protagonist chose what they wanted out of the weapon’s shop, you'll battle slimes big and small in order to restore the light to the monoliths. Maybe one thing that could have been made a bit simpler just because of the level designs especially when walls were involved would have been the armored slimes. These things were just unfair at times to go up against and a waste of time if you had to actually dispatch them. Unlike a lot of others, these armored slimes required you to hit at an exact spot behind their helmet and often the boomerang would ting off the side. Sure eventually you can run and jump or dodge over, but when there’s no space and you HAVE to defeat them? It just felt like it took a little away from how well designed the rest was.
Finally, boss fights I felt were fun, but maybe a bit too repetitive. All you needed to do was to get the boss’ health bar down to zero but often the rinse and repeat patterns to knock you off of where you need to stand or make you dodge or get the angles just right, felt forced. Unlike the lighthearted fun puzzles that the stages provided, these just felt out of place and I found that they could have benefited from maybe a more puzzle-like design to take them out than simply making it a pure hit until they are dead styled affair.
Summary
Overall though, The Lightbringer by Rock Square Thunder is a light hearted and maybe even entry level adventure for those thinking of getting into the style or for veterans needing something low key for an afternoon. Soft and bright colour palettes with an easy to pick up gameplay, it's a relaxing game if you've been needing a break from forty hour adventure or daily grinds.
Score: 7.75 / 10
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