Night Lights — In Search of Lost Stars

A fairly easy 2–3 hour 2D platformer with a really interesting mechanic built around how light interacts with the world. Everything happens at night, and each location has a spotlight, a portable flashlight, or a TV — the light from these is what drives all the puzzle magic. Light can hide certain objects, cut through impassable obstacles, or activate mechanisms. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it gets in your way. Spotlights can be switched on and aimed; TVs and flashlights can be dragged around and even launched. Plenty of variety and fun guaranteed.

Simple and clean, vector-based, yet thoroughly pleasant and stylish. The blue-and-orange colour palette combined with geometric, straight-lined art looks like a well-designed poster. In motion it never tires the eye — the contrast is sharp and the gameplay space is clearly separated from the decorative background. Interactive elements are distinct and easy to spot, so you won’t run past a button or lever you need.

Minimalist. The robot itself makes about 5 sounds while moving — quirky little noises that never get annoying. If you turn the music off, the background is a very pleasant night-forest ambience — wind, rustling leaves, and owl calls.

The soundtrack consists of a handful of tracks, electronic and equally minimalist. Calm and unobtrusive, it plays with pauses, fading gently into silence and easing back just as smoothly. It barely outstayed its welcome over the whole playthrough. Though if the game ran longer than 3 hours, I’d probably switch to just the leaves and owls.

I should mention upfront that I ran into a few bugs, but none of them are critical and they don’t really get in the way of the experience.

The first thing I’d like to point out — the non-linear structure of the journey. There is a starting location and an ending location with a direct path between them, but there are plenty of side locations you can visit in different orders. This can throw you off a bit, which is exactly what happened to me right at the start — enough that I decided to restart the game. It’s nothing serious: you might end up going in circles somewhere, or revisit a location before you’re ready and find it too easy.

The main waypoints are the skills the robot acquires, and each portal is labelled with which skill it corresponds to. If you visit them in the same order you unlock the skills, you’re unlikely to get lost.

Second: some levels can be broken, so if something goes wrong and you can’t see a solution — it makes sense to restart the level from the beginning. You may have done something out of order, or dropped the TV in the wrong spot. 🙂

And third — collectibles. There are three kinds: lightning bolts, pebbles, and little stars.

Lightning bolts increase your battery capacity; you don’t need to grab them all at once. If you can’t reach a bolt right away, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong — you’ll most likely come back for it once you have a new skill.

Pebbles open portals and trigger some important mechanisms, so unlike bolts it’s worth picking them up as soon as you see them. Running short on pebbles at a critical moment may send you all the way back hunting for the one you missed.

Stars — the rarest collectible, only three in the whole game, needed at the very end, and practically impossible to miss, so don’t worry about them.