The Child Of Light-iverse Expands
Princess and another castle?
Do you remember Child of Light [official site]? It was a painterly platformer/JRPG which Ubisoft billed as a playable poem. Well, it's clearly done well enough that Ubisoft have a number of "very cool projects" in the works which will be set in the same universe.
Child of Light started life as part of Ubisoft's effort to create small-scale projects within its triple-A walls, taking advantage of resources like the UbiArt Framework which was used in the most recent Rayman games.
I never got round to playing the final release, although I did attend a preview event and rather liked the combat. There was something immensely satisfying about entering battle as a tiny girl - a determined princess-style character - wielding a gigantic sword which I'd modded to electrocute everyone it slashed. The rest of the world was less engaging although incredibly pretty.
Marsh reviewed the full game for us and his summary suggests the full release was a similar experience.
"I want to enjoy it more: the hybridity of the game is daring and to be applauded. There’s obvious passion and idiosyncrasy here, which aren’t things you can always say about games spat from the cogs of AAA development. But delightful though it looks, and as winsome as its talking mice are, the combination of frictionless overworld and my frustration with its battle system left me feeling enervated."
But the game has clearly impressed at Ubisoft. Patrick Plourde (who led the Child of Light project and whose current job is to identify promising concepts from Ubisoft employees and support them to release) tweeted:
What exactly those projects are is yet to be confirmed but I'm interested enough that I want to hear more.