Ubisoft Montreal built Child of Light on the UbiArt Framework engine, and it shows in every frame. The 2014 platforming role-playing game is presented like a storybook told in verse, hand-painted from top to bottom. It is also one of the stranger big-publisher releases of its decade: a turn-based RPG with a playable firefly.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Aurora Wakes in Lemuria
The setup is grim for a fairytale. Aurora is a princess in Austria, born to a Duke who rules a kingdom of five hills. On Good Friday, 1895, she seemingly dies in her sleep. Her father, already broken by the apparent death of Aurora’s mother, takes to his bed.
She wakes on an altar in Lemuria. The Queen of the Night, Umbra, has stolen the sun, the moon and the stars, and the land lives in fear of her. Aurora wants only to go home. To do that she must recover the light.
Igniculus, the Firefly You Control
The best idea in Child of Light is a small one, and it glows. Igniculus is a firefly the player moves freely, outside and during battle. He opens chests Aurora cannot reach. He shines on an enemy to slow it down, or on an ally to heal them.
That single mechanic ties exploration and combat together. It also gives a second player something real to do, since Igniculus can be handled co-operatively.
A Battle System Borrowed From Final Fantasy
Battles use turn-based combat close to the active-time system of the Final Fantasy and Grandia games. The player controls up to two characters and swaps them with waiting allies. Up to three enemies can appear.
Positioning matters before a fight starts. Approach an enemy from behind and you get a Surprise Strike. Let one approach you from behind and you eat an Ambush. It is a small rule that makes the side-scrolling map feel dangerous rather than decorative.
The Races of a Peninsular Continent
Lemuria is a peninsular continent in an alternate world, and it is densely populated for a game this length. Greater Lemuria holds ancient ruins, massive trees and floating islands. The Aerostati, an elfin race, live on those islands. West of the Mahthildis Forest sits a village of the Capilli, dwarf-like magic users. Further west, the town of Bolmus Populi rests on the back of a benevolent stone giant and belongs to anthropomorphic trader mice. The Pisceans dwell in the Flooded Lands near the Cynbel Sea. The warlike Kategida guard the realm.
Four explorers discovered the continent and colonized it. The Queen of Light ruled for ages, then vanished one night. Umbra rose from the darkness, took the sun, stars and moon, and conquered the land.
Rubella, Finn and the Rest of the Party
Aurora gathers allies as she goes, and the roster has more personality than most RPG parties twice its size:
- Rubella, an Aerostati jester with a vocabulary problem, hunting her brother Tristis
- Finn, a timid young Capilli sorcerer whose village suffers under an Umbra curse
- Norah, Aurora’s stepsister, pulled through the mirror into Lemuria
- Robert, a Populi trader and archer
- Óengus, a Kategida exiled from his post
The Lady of the Forest, once freed from her chamber, explains the mirror connecting the two worlds. She hands over a flute, advice, and the stars — which let Aurora fly.
The Mirror at the Temple of the Moon
Child of Light saves its turn for late. The party finds the mirror home at the Temple of the Moon. Aurora crosses and meets her stepmother and stepsister, Cordelia. Norah admits she led Aurora into a trap. The stepmother is Umbra. Norah and Cordelia are Nox and Crepusculum, the daughters sent to steal Lemuria’s sun and moon. Umbra’s arch-enemy, the Queen of Light, is Aurora’s own mother.
That is a lot of revelation to land in one room, and it lands because the game has spent hours being quiet about it.
Where Child of Light Stumbles
Not everything holds. The verse narration is a conceit that wears thin, and the rhyming can flatten scenes that needed plain speech. The party is large but the battle system only ever fields two characters at once, so most of those allies spend the game waiting.
The exploration is thinner than the art deserves. Lemuria is gorgeous and mostly linear. The Capilli, the Populi, the Pisceans and the Kategida are vivid on paper and underused in play.
What survives all of that is the tone. Child of Light is sincere without being saccharine, and it treats a dying child’s dream kingdom as a place worth saving. Ubisoft Montreal made a small, strange, beautiful thing inside a publisher known for scale, and it still stands apart.
Child of Light: 8.8 of 10
The published critic aggregate sits at 8.8 out of 10 across 14 outlets, and that feels right. Child of Light is not a perfect RPG — the combat is borrowed, the world is narrower than it looks, and the verse gimmick costs more than it gives. It is, however, a game with a real point of view, and those are rarer than good engines. Igniculus alone justifies the trip.
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