Thank you, Ratalaika Games, for the code!

Night Lights has a unique gameplay hook—it all takes place at night, and you use light sources to reveal certain features on the landscape that can help you solve simple puzzles. As a robot, it’s your job to make it to a certain location in the desert, using your suite of simple abilities to solve switch and pressure-pad puzzles to help you get there. However, ultimately this game doesn’t live up to even a moderate amount of hype, and I found it rather disappointing.

The basic story behind Night Lights is… well, honestly, I can’t tell you. Something about a comet. Why can’t I mention more than that? Well, the first thing you see when you boot up the game after the credits is a short cutscene that should explain the story. However, this cutscene was so glitched and ran so unevenly, I couldn’t watch it properly. It ran as if I had a very bad connection to the Internet and was trying to watch a video on Youtube; anytime something happened quickly, the video slowed down and skipped, with horrible resolution. It’s not a good sign when the first part you see is glitched beyond recognition, and unfortunately, that ominous first sign turned out to largely be correct.

You control a robot who lives alone in a treehouse (why he’s a robot, no clue), and to get from your house to where the comet landed, you have to go through an interconnected world consisting of a series of screens you teleport between and solve a multitude of puzzles to get access to your destination. The puzzles themselves are pretty standard fare; get a block, take it to a pressure pad, the pad activates something that allows you to get further, etc. Where Night Lights stands out a bit more is that you use spotlights and lamps (and, later, your own head) to shine a light on the landscape, which can not just reveal but shape the actual environment. Turn a light on an area, and it doesn’t just show a tunnel in the side of a wall you wouldn’t have seen in the dark; it actually makes that tunnel[i][b] exist[/b][/i]. Turn off the light and walk over to that area, and the tunnel isn’t there anymore.

It doesn’t make much logical sense, but it makes for an intriguing gameplay twist. Beyond just showing tunnels, turning on lights can reveal (or make disappear) ladders, platforms, and the like. Many of these lights can be rotated, and knowing what lights to use when and where is the key to getting across the landscape and getting the boxes and weights where you need to be. Some of the “boxes” are things like TV sets or lanterns that you can turn on/off, changing the landscape as you travel through it. Turn off a light while you’re in a tunnel, and rather awkwardly, the game will slooowly move you towards the area you entered said tunnel, along with any objects you carried in with you—no matter how far into the tunnel you’re in. It seems like an odd glitch, but actually, the game requires you to use this for a mechanic to some puzzles. Need to get a box up a lengthy climb? Move the box into the revealed tunnel on a spotlight, then rotate the spotlight up slowly and as the revealed portion of the tunnel moves up it will move the box up with it.

Unfortunately, the core gameplay twist doesn’t really get any more complicated than this. By about the halfway point of this 4-6 hour game, I was actually predicting pretty well what the light would make appear/disappear. It’s mostly just this mechanic added to box and pressure-pad puzzles. Thus, most puzzles aren’t all that difficult, and at worst can be solved with a little trial-and-error. There are some collectible lightning bolt tokens across the game, but they don’t really require additional puzzles to get to them—just abilities you haven’t been given yet at the point you come across them. You don’t even need to get remotely all of these bolt tokens to get the final trophy for them (you get a trophy for getting 50 of them, and there’s a LOT more than 50), so other than OCD completism there’s no reason to extend the game length to get these.

At a couple of predetermined points throughout the course of Night Lights, you’ll descend briefly into some ruins, where you’ll gain some abilities one-by-one—including the ability to double-jump, run, turn on your own head as a light, and dash through the air. Only the head-light ability really changes some of the puzzle mechanics, though—the rest just allow you to reach some areas personally that you couldn’t before/were gated off. This sense of progression isn’t as streamlined as it could be, however. For instance, once I was stuck for half an hour on a puzzle because I couldn’t figure it out, only to find out that I needed an additional ability to be able to solve it. Since I didn’t know the abilities I’d be getting in advance, I’m not sure how the developers expected me to get that.

Additionally, some of the abilities randomly glitch. Multiple times during Night Lights, I suddenly became unable to jump and move horizontally at the same time, something obviously vital to moving around. Only going back all the way to the main menu and re-loading my game solved it. The dash ability is also horribly glitched—it moves you FAR too fast, to the point where the screen can’t keep up with you. You’ll very easily go off the side of the screen using this ability, and you can’t really stop using it with any degree of precision, again something the platforming aspect of this game requires. Thankfully the dash ability is the last one you get, but this makes the last part of the game quite frustrating when there’s no reason for it to be.

Other aspects of the game fit this “meh, it doesn’t crash so it’s good enough” aspect of quality. Sometimes my character would get close enough to the edge of the screen that the view would pan past the point where it should, revealing (for example) that a mountain suddenly stopped just off-screen, with empty space beyond it where the rest of that feature should logically be. I also “outsmarted” the developers a couple of times, much to Night Light’s detriment. For example, the game clearly establishes after you get your “head light” that you can put that light down temporarily as a weight to hold down a pressure pad. Well, I used it on a pressure pad once… only nothing happened. It should have solved the puzzle, but it didn’t solve it *their* way, so it didn’t work. Instead I had to go through the arduous task of getting another lantern and putting *that* on the switch instead, and then it finally worked. Additionally, when I finished the game (and don’t ask me what the very brief ending meant), the credits starting running… but the coding “forgot” to actually get rid of the robot I was controlling, so I kept jumping around off-screen and couldn’t escape the credits without just quitting.

The graphics are high-res, but rather simple “Flash-like” graphics, and there’s no real visual interaction between your character and other objects. The robot doesn’t strain when pushing a box, for example, or use other little animation changes that would give it “life”. The night world is also very quiet—in fact, you’re the only living thing (beyond trees) in the entire game. As a result, everything feels rather sterile and unrealistic, even taking into account the rather simplistic art style. The music is initially kinda neat-sounding, but it’s a very repetitive tune on a 10-second or so loop, and only changes very slightly between the 3 different main environments (forest, city, and desert), so it quickly gets to a point where it’s preferable to turn it off.

On the other hand, morally this game is pretty clean. You’re just a simple robot pushing boxes and lighting things up—you’re not fighting anyone, so there’s no violence in that respect. There are some pits you can fall into or some spikes you can catch on, but there’s not even a hurt/dying animation—when the robot hits the spikes or falls off the board, it just makes a “uh-oh!” kinda noise and then you appear right back where you entered, with your progress reset to the beginning of that screen. Although the game takes place entirely at night, there’s nothing like scary silhouettes or peeping owls or anything like that that would scare young kids. When you receive your new powers in the game, some glowing runes pop up and you’re “imbued” with said powers, so in a very vague sense there’s some magic involved.

Watching the trailers online, Night Lights seemed like a pretty cool twist on the usual puzzle platformer game, and I was interested to give it a try. Even tempering my expectations somewhat with the $5 price tag though, given the number of glitches, nearly broken mechanics, and lack of depth, Night Lights is one game that should’ve spent a lot more time in the sun before being released.

-Brad Weckman