Set in a world of stained glass, Gleamlight is an formidable recreation with an unstated story designed to disclose itself to you. There isn’t a tutorial and no directions. The sport twinkles into life and leaves you to determine it out for your self.
Gleamlight is about in a singular world that the designers have clearly put loads of thought into creating. All the pieces is product of richly colored glass. Obstacles, vegetation, enemies, even the silent playable character all seem like product of cathedral home windows, with mild refracting by all the pieces you see. The mild music matches the atmosphere, with the conflict of breaking glass shattering by the tender soundtrack each time you knock apart a barrier or slash at an enemy.
There isn’t a well being bar that reveals the way you or your opponents are doing. As a substitute, mild glows by you, which dims every time you are taking harm. Once you cease shining altogether, you die. Every time you inflict harm on an enemy, its mild transfers to you, so you may regain any misplaced well being by defeating monsters. This isn’t instantly apparent however is simple sufficient to determine.
It neatly matches the stained glass aesthetic of the sport, and in addition provides an additional layer to the fights. Whereas smaller enemies are pretty simple to beat, boss battles do get more durable when you may barely see the monster you’re combating.
The fundamental strikes are pretty simple. Shifting, leaping and attacking are simple to work out. For a very long time, you don’t actually must do the rest. If you happen to run into one thing that stumps you, mashing the buttons till one thing occurs will normally get you previous it.
The shortage of UI is cute, however it could possibly make some parts irritating. As an example, it’s not clear once you’ve picked up a brand new ability. You won’t even attempt to discover different strikes because it’s not troublesome to hack and slash your method by a lot of the platforms. It additionally signifies that there isn’t a lot of a story to Gleamlight. Whereas the outline encourages you to piece it collectively for your self, it doesn’t really feel like there are a lot of items there and you find yourself simply enjoying for the sake of enjoying with out a plot.
This is able to be nice if there was extra range to the motion, it’s not an unusual trope of one of these recreation. A lot of the enemies might be defeated fairly shortly and even the bosses solely have a handful of various strikes. Gleamlight is a quite simple recreation, with its major focus being its aesthetic. Loads of 2D platformers are equally simplistic, however they normally price a good bit much less.
What is especially unlucky for Gleamlight is that from the beginning it was in comparison with Hole Knight – one other 2D platformer with no UI and a good looking backdrop, which is at the moment about half the worth of Gleamlight and has much more substance to it.
Gleamlight has a pleasant premise that undoubtedly had potential, but it surely doesn’t stand out when in comparison with its fast friends.
