Finding Light
Finding Light is a tribute to the classics – relive the era of 8-bit dungeon crawling, monster slaying and treasure looting! Features:
- Beautiful Grayscale pixel graphics and 8-bit audio SFX
- Gameplay reminiscent of classic handheld RPGs:
- Turn-based combat
- Customize your party with six playable characters
- Brew specialized potions and elixirs with herbs found from enemies
- Gain spells and powerful techniques via equipment and spell orbs
- The Spirit Fox Roxie’s abilities are determined by the meat she consumes from monsters
- Three difficulty modes for casual and experienced players
- Steam achievements
Story:
As monsters and miasma poured forth from the Black Tower, heroes Mari and Abbie climbed the tower and defeated its master, the wizard Morgoth. Two years later, Abbie vanished. At the same time, a towering spire emerged, stretching from the ocean’s depths to beyond the sky. "Heaven’s Door", as some called it, caused the oceans to flood, submerging cities, kingdoms and even entire continents.
—
Finding Light follows the tale of Mari and her quest to find her beloved partner Abbie and solve the mystery of Heaven’s Door. Joined by the wise cleric Keller, the former knight Stray and Malady the witch, Mari must travel beyond the sky, through the ocean’s depths and deep underground to find the entrance to Heaven’s Door and find her partner before the world succumbs to darkness.
Finding Light is a stand-alone game as well as the fourth entry in the Knights of Ambrose Saga.
Steam User 36
Finding Light Trip to Heaven's Door
📋 Premise
Finding Light is a handheld-style RPG game that brings back the old GameBoy adventures with its grayscale tones. Developed and published by Joshua Keith, Finding Light takes place in the same universe as its predecessors: Knight Bewitched and Mari and the Black Tower. Even though it is a brand new experience story wise, the repeated mentions of characters and events from previous games might confuse a new player. Finding Light doesn't aim high. Whilst it's not a game that wants to offer you the absolute best content for its genre, it does an amazing job in giving a fast-paced experience, full of funny dialogues and retro-esque features.
✅ Pros:
• Nice story and fast-paced narrative
• Appropriate, and funny, usage of fourth-wall breaking dialogues
• Different difficulties, fit for who wants to enjoy the story over the combat and vice-versa
• The pixeled artwork is pleasing and 8-Bit RPGs fans will feel right at home
❎ Cons:
• The game easily falls prey to repetitiveness
• Sudden difficulty spike forcing the player to grind for more levels
• There are a few annoying bugs and a game-breaking one
🎮 Gameplay: in depth
General information
Finding Light takes from the old RPG classics, creating an endearing adventure that isn't for everybody. While the game doesn't try to be massive, the fast-paced narrative makes up for the relatively small world we're thrown in. So small, in fact, that it might even leave you a bit confused. Finding Light's world isn't "contained" within borders, on the contrary, it tries to portray a round world: this becomes particularly noticeable once we start sailing, flying or swimming underwater. If, for example, we start from point X and arrive at point Y, whereas we wanted to go on even further, we will eventually end up at point X once again after having traveled all the "globe". Even though this is a smart little detail, it often isn't so welcome. In many instances, the developer has created maze-like dungeons and having the map endlessly repeat itself can be disorientating.
If at first, the game's world appears too small and voided of locations to visit and dungeons to explore, you'll be delighted to find out that Finding Light's world is actually built in layers. You'll be starting in the Overworld, and you'll soon find out that the world offers lands way up in the sky, cities underwater and even kingdoms underground. Exploring every location that each layer has to offer is important for lore lovers since most of it is only explained by talking to inhabitants. The biggest fault in Finding Light probably takes place in this portion of the game.
The fast-paced narrative combined with a handful of throwbacks to past games can result very confusing for someone that is making their first approach towards Joshua's works. Many past events are connected to the heroes we will be finding on our path. Even Mari, our protagonist, and Abbie, her partner, origin from another of Joshua's games: Mari and the Black Tower. Thanks to funny and embroiling dialogue choices, however, the plot-hole gets put on the back burner.
Like many other RPGs, Finding Light falls prey to a common fault that has always plagued games of the genre. Repetitiveness. Traveling around the world will always result in getting involved in countless random battles. While you could avoid most of them by escaping as soon as you get to the battle screen, it is not advised to do so because of the terrible difficulty spike that hits around late mid-game.
Story
The story is straightforward and lacks detailed narrative. We take control of Mari, a nymph that along with her partner, Abbie, had previously saved the world from the Black Tower's threat. Upon doing so, Abbie mysteriously disappeared and Mari returned to her homeland to mourn and seek some peace. The sudden appearance of what people call "Heaven's Door" will finally put Mari's gears in motion again, and along her magical pet companion, Roxie, she'll set out on a journey to find and ultimately save Abbie.
Other than Mari and Roxie, other four characters will join our party. Most of them are characters that in previous games and timelines were tied to the world's fate.
Combat
The combat system is what really shines here. While it is not innovative nor unique, the fact that it neatly brings back old-style turn-based RPGs features like the ones we used to see in the first Final Fantasy games truly warms one's heart up.
Our fighting formation is composed of 4 out of the 6 characters that we can have in our party. The way they are located from left to right does not affect who is going to attack first since the characters with the highest AGI stats will be going first. When it is our turn to choose what our characters will do, we are presented with many different options: attack, magic, skills, defend or items.
Thanks to the magic and skills palettes, many are available to us when deciding how to set our party up. Magic wise there's no limitation to which characters can use said spells. Skills are usually tied to the type of gear you're wearing or the weapon your character is wielding. Blunt weapons are more likely to have melee skills, while scepters are more likely to have spells bound to them.
Contrary to what you might have experienced in other games, Finding Light always allows you to be able to escape battles unless they are boss battles or plot-related fights. This generally spares the player from hours of pointless fighting while traveling between locations.
Content
Finding Light is a relatively small game and even though it's hindered with some necessary grinding, it can easily be finished with not much effort. The different difficulties could, however, entice the players offering dozen hours more of playtime. The achievements themselves tease the completionists by telling them to defeat the final boss at the hardest difficulty.
🔬 Technical Analysis
Graphics
Joshua Keith has remained loyal to the old-style 8-Bit RPGs and this is clear from the very first moment we start the game up. While it obviously does not offer anything new, the pixeled world of Finding Light is detailed and pleasing to the eye.
Music
The music is never absent throughout the game and is characteristic of the genre. It offers us a soundtrack that shares many similarities with the tunes from old games such as the very first Pokémon ones, for example.
Performance
There aren't any significant performance problems besides the occasional stutters here and there during battles, usually followed by a crash.
Bugs Encountered
The game presents a few bugs and a particularly game-breaking one. Not saving frequently enough can easily ruin your experience in Finding Light.
- Got stuck in the walls while in the Tower of Trials
- Frequent crashes during battles
- There's no way of getting unstuck when exiting Tiamat's cave after the boss battle: leaving the room through the stairs will get you stuck in a stalactite
🎬 Wrapping up
Finding Light is definitely worth checking out for every fan of the genre. It's got all the features that make it a small gem and a work of art if we consider that the game has been made with RPGMaker. At the price it's being offered it's an incredible deal, given that the bugs that undermine the game are taken care of.
📈 RATING: 7/10
Disclaimer:
This product was reviewed with a key provided by the developer for free.
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Steam User 8
Finding Light is an old style RPG with a simple presentation and a good storyline. It's based on the setting in which the previous two games of Joshua Keith take place: Mari and the Black Tower (which at the time of this review I haven't played yet) and Knight Bewitched, so you will get more from Finding Light by playing both other games first.
The combat mechanics are probably as simple as the games it's based on but will probably be still engaging for most players for the complete duration of the game, the way you choose to equip your characters and the way you set up your party can give the combat some extra variety too.
The narrative doesn't do anything groundbreaking but the story is interesting enough during most of the game, and funny when it needs to be, it took some time to hook me up but it was worth it. The characters that are recurring from the previous games are as entertaining as always, but sadly their interactions sometimes feel limited by the simple presentation which may be something that appeals for some people but for me the art style of Knight Bewitched was a nice sweet spot.
There is also a sizable amount of optional content in this game that expands the story and brings back old beloved characters, I think this was very well tackled.
In my opinion the strongest point of this game is brining together the world of the 2 other games previously mentioned, so I would recommend it to anyone who played and liked either Mari and the Black Tower or Knight Bewitched. Overall Finding Light is a good game for those looking for a classic RPG experience with some touches of yuri, but for me a Knight Bewitched is still my favorite game of the Ambrose saga.
(Also someone needs to point this out before I go mad: there is a Loss easter egg hidden in this game.)
Steam User 7
I really didn't expect to enjoy this game ... 8-bit, greyscale ... hmmmm
But the old brain soon adjusts and you're drawn into the story. Music is retro and really great in some areas - especially the future section of the Black Tower.
Game objectives are clear, though not always easy to achieve. I spent a lot of time running round trying to find things. Battles in new sections are always a challenge too.
Steam achievements are working. And I missed out on defeating the Master Slime and on finding the last alchemical recipes. Also I was playing on Normal - I don't think I could manage Hard on this game.
This is the third in the Knights of Ambrose games. I'm off to play the last game now ...
In case anyone wants to know the order of these games here it is:
1. Knight Bewitched
2. Mari and the Black Tower
3. Finding Light
4. Knight Eternal
Happy gaming!
Steam User 3
As someone who grew up with the original GameBoy this game stood out to me immediately with it’s greyscale pixel graphics. Memories of Final Fantasy Legend II came straight to mind. Just the greyscale art style in general stood out for me amongst all the other indie RPGs that frequently adopt a NES or SNES palette. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the world, music and characters of Finding Light. I’ve yet to play any of the other games in this series; but even as a standalone title I felt the references to its prequel didn’t hamper my experience in the slightest. I did experience some very, very minor bugs but nothing gamebreaking at all thankfully. I just feel a lot of soul went into making this game and its characters, and I do hope it gets the attention it truly deserves.
Steam User 1
A game reminiscent of Saga/Final Fantasy Legend on the gameboy, with a lot of heart and very old-school feeling. Be aware that the combat can be pretty basic and the graphics a little dull. Still, I had fun playing it to relax eveyr now and then
Steam User 2
This is in my opinion the best one in this series of 4 games so far. If you are thinking of playing it I would suggest getting Knight Bewitched first, which is the second in the series. The first one, Black Tower, is rather repetitive and is not really related to the second, even though it is to the rest, so you can come back to it afterwards if you are committed to playing the whole series.
Also Dispel is the worst thing in the history of everything and I hated it with a passion. Otherwise very enjoyable game.
Steam User 3
crab.