One Upon Light shines brighter as a demo than full game (review)

One Upon Light is a midcore Playstation 4 puzzler, whose launch we celebrated last week, and it was developed by the Singapore-based SUTD Game Lab. This top-down monochromatic game puts you in the shoes of a scientist who wakes up to find that he’s now allergic to light.

As you may have guessed, this puzzle game is centred around light and shadows. Stepping into the light makes you keel over and die, so you must navigate a creaking laboratory by using shadows cast by walls, machinery, and other assorted furniture. You’ll be pushing filing cabinets against windows and scurrying along the shadow of a cart on dolly tracks.

Whoever designed One Upon Light must have been a rad physics student. How light and shadows are portrayed in each area, and the fixes you need to get past them, reflect a real-world accuracy you wouldn’t expect in such a stylized game. The black-and-white atmosphere of the game and its understated sound effects come together to really bring the scientist’s monochrome hell to life.

One Upon Light’s demos, featuring just a small part of the game, have been great, and my sentiments are shared worldwide. So it’s disappointing to see that the full version falls a bit short. It’s not that the actual game didn’t deliver what the demos promised. Visuals, game features, and audio are all up to scratch. Where SUTD Game Lab stumbled was translating the fun, puzzle-solving experience of its short demos into a full game.

I came into the game expecting a story-driven puzzler. What I got was screen after screen of tediously long obstacle courses, which rewarded me with a simple newspaper clipping after completion. The game doesn’t just make you crack your head to get through an area either – you’re also required to put some skill into timing the runs you take alongside moving shadows. SUTD warned One Upon Light is a mid to hardcore game, but I find it’s more frustrating than “core.”

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It’s not just puzzle solving – there’s a bit of action going on in there as well, where you need to scurry behind a moving shadow at a very specific time in order to stay alive. Less careful players like myself will find themselves constantly burning up in the light. There’s no penalty for death in this game, but constant death makes One Upon Light tedious, and the lack of a good reward at the end of every level is not motivating enough.

The newspaper clippings, their readability limited to headlines, aren’t compelling enough to keep a player going, and they are the only reward at the end of each area. While you do end up with the power to make a copy of a shadow left behind, and to be able to push and pull filing cabinets, that’s pretty much all you can do.

Ultimately, the main flaw in One Upon Light isn’t its visuals, its audio, or even its gameplay. It’s the game’s pace and difficulty level. One Upon Light has some great puzzles, but when put together, these puzzles feel like they’d be more at home on a mobile phone, played in short bursts while waiting for the bus. There’s simply not enough meat on this game’s bones to justify its difficulty, or its dragged-out length.