Fall of Light Preview

Here is Matteo on the left presenting the game to someone

Fall of Light is developed by Runeheads, a team of two designers located in Italy. One of them, Matteo, the game designer, gave me a tour of the game by means of a hands-on session. According to Matteo, the game is a mix between Dark Souls and ICO.

In the game you are Nyx a seasoned warrior who has to guide his daughter Aether to the final stages of the game. You will have to keep her alive during your journey. She does however not take part in any fights, but she can buff your weapon as long as you do not stray too far from her.

Every weapon in the game has a different power and she can collect more powers from special shrines in the game. Only one power buff can be applied to a weapon, so if you would like to use different powers, you need different weapons.

You can also dual wield one-handed weapons to have two weapons with two different powers assigned to them. In total there are nine different categories of weapons you can use; dagger, one-handed axe, one handed mace, one-handed sword, two-handed sword, two-handed hammer, halberd, crossbow and shield. On top of that there is also one secret weapon that is not yet revealed (he did reveal it to me, but let's be low on spoilers...).
In Fall of Light you will have a variety of battle stances that you can use in the game and which you can improve over time.

The game has 10 different areas. The first area is the tutorial and after that you travel to a city, which acts like a hub, from where you can go to the forest, mountain or the desert. From the forest you can access the dungeon of water, from the mountain the dungeon of electricity and from the desert the dungeon of fire. You daughter has to collect three different elemental shards from each of these dungeons. Once those are collected you can go to the last area of the game, with the final battle, where you get to see one of the three possible endings: the good, the bad and the normal.

Fall of Light has a permadeath system. If you reach the ending without ever dying and also unlocking  four secret areas that you need to discover for yourself, you get the good ending. If you die, but decide you want to continue anyway without restarting, you get the bad ending. You get into the normal ending when you don't die, but also don't unlock all of the 4 secret areas. According to Matteo, you should be able to complete the game in 8 hours without dying. It will take you however much longer, depending on how often you die and you restart the game. Especially if you play in nightmare mode instead of normal. In nightmare mode there are no lights in the game and the only thing that can shed a light on things is your daughter or your own lamp that you get at the beginning of the game, but needs to be recharged at dedicated stations. It also needs to be put down, when you want to fight. Besides that the enemies are stronger, the items are in different locations and some of the enemies also behave differently.

The game has up to 15 different enemies. Each of them with different move patterns and using different attack combos.

In Fall of Light the main story will unfold itself to you by reading books you discover in the game and talking to NPCs. But, there is also a second story, next to the main story, which has a plot twist, but it would be a serious spoiler to talk about that any further. The game also features environmental puzzles that you need to solve in order to progress.

As mentioned you need to make sure your daughter is close to you at all times. You can take her hand and run with her, but she will grow tired over time from running and needs to rest. In that case your only options are to wait for a while or continue to walk, instead of running.
The game has a checkpoint system, where you can level up if your XP bar is filled,  providing you with one point you can spent on imroving your battle skills. If you die, your daughter will die as well. If you decide not to restart the game, but respawn at your last checkpoint, you can go over to your daughter and revive her again. You can not only die from being killed by enemies, but also by falling of the path. There is nothing preventing you from falling off the edge of a path, so you have to keep that in mind when fighting your enemies.

In the tutorial section the information you need to know in order to play the game is written on the ground. You can read that to get more information on how the game is to be controlled. After that you are on your own. I only played part of the tutorial section, so there isn't much I can say about the other areas. For me the tutorial section was already difficult enough, but then again I sucked at Dark Souls as well, so that might not be saying much. If you didn't and you don't mind the uncomplicated graphics of the game, Fall of Light might be something to consider when it releases on September 28, 2017.