A Light In Chorus: A Case In Points
The good kind of "like a cloud of fireflies"
Spending just half a day at EGX meant a whistle-stop tour of Things Which Are Eyecatching And Pip You Have Destiny At Home GET OUT OF THAT QUEUE IMMEDIATELY. That's how A Light In Chorus pinged back onto my radar, in the Leftfield Collection section curated by David Hayward.
A Light in Chorus is a point cloud exploration affair at present. Alas, enthusing about point clouds tends to net you a lot of blank looks from friends in the pub so the more accessible explanation is "the objects and landscape are made from clouds of little light particles – it's like walking through a sculpture park made from fireflies".
There's a degree of interactivity in the current build as some of the ghostly objects can be swapped for others in your inventory. A broken neon 'C' is replaced with a working one you picked up earlier and marks the entrance to a funfair. I managed to explore my way out of the funfair and into some curious parkland populated with lampposts pretty quickly but there's a lot more you can do within the space. The game's developers Eliott Johnson and Matthew Warshaw explained you can also rearrange bits of the rides if you so wish – the individual Ferris wheel carriages can be unhooked and reconfigured, for example.
Ever since that Owl City Fireflies song, describing anything as a "made from fireflies" runs the risk of sounding inescapably twee. However, what I played managed to be lovely without tipping over into twee-dom. Just as well, really because at the first sign of a ten thousand lightning bugs gearing up to hug me I'd have been out of that expo faster than a greased weasel on a slip 'n' slide.
The team are currently considering their next move. Part of that will likely be keeping an eye on the tension between a free-er kind of exploration and actual puzzle solving elements. But even in its present form, A Light in Chorus is a beautifully constructed and gentle experience with plenty of charm.