Preview: Lonelight

I always have been and always will be a sucker for some good pixel art. When Lonelight came across my radar, I had to do a double take. The title font, along with a pink-haired person tucked in the corner, immediately reminded me of the pixel standout Eastward, one of the most impressive-looking games I’ve seen in years. I double-checked to see if Lonelight maybe was a Pixpil (Eastward developer) project. 

Lonelight is the first project from FYLLAS, unaffiliated with Pixpil, who appears to be the primary developer working on the game. The demo I played for preview took me just under an hour, which left me with more questions to muse on rather than definitive answers. 

The game starts with its best foot forward, using the first few precious minutes to set the tone. You start as a single white pixel in a glassy, aquamarine plane. Others like you scatter aimlessly around the same corridor. As you move forward, a line of increasingly smaller pixels tails behind you. You move with the grace of a fish as you move forward.

The ambience is profoundly relaxing, and for a second I wondered if I had booted up the right game. The hallway leads you to different pixel clusters where a feminine, mother-coded voice speaks to you about your existence. It’s calming. It’s encouraging. Then suddenly, the title screen flashes and crescendos like the THX clip before a movie starts, and you’re in a broken, nondescript laboratory.

The transition is a bit abrupt, but it also re-establishes the tone, the reason for which will not become apparent in the demo’s runtime. There’s not a whole lot of exposition here. You boot up and start hovering above the ground. The level design is straightforward, so I never really got lost, but the game is hands-off. You’re first instructed to press a button to interact, yet nothing is highlighted. Lonelight feels old school in this way, where you sort of have to feel your way around a room to get an idea of what you’re doing. Each time that I would interact with a broken monitor, or skull, or whatever bits and bobs were strewn about, a tongue-in-cheek, metanarrative line would pop up. 

Ah, so Lonelight is more Undertale than Eastward. As you bump your way into things, the dialogue box presents an ever so slightly metanarrative observation about the object you’re facing. This is a far cry from the soothing, embryonic state you start the game in. While it’s fine, I started to wonder where Lonelight’s own voice would fit into the game. A lot more puzzle pieces were on the board than any definite image of what the game would be.

As I meandered through a few more rooms, I came across Cora. This protocol robot gets you on your feet, er, hover boosters and will serve as your guide as you work your way through the lab. I liked Cora quite a lot. There’s an especially endearing character portrait whenever they blush, and the writing strengthens the tone of the game with more winks. You come across other NPCs as well, but they don’t offer too much more than world-building tidbits or quick jokes.

They explain your dash manoeuvre and how your health functions. You can dash up to three times without penalty. Should you dash again, it will come at the cost of one of your five health points. Dashes and health points both have cooldowns, so you won’t ever be completely at the mercy of sacrificing your health to get out of tight spots. However, the health point regeneration is incredibly slow. I never found enough time to regain health outside of checkpoints.

While the player will pick up a light and heavy attack shortly after, the dash is Lonelight’s characteristic mechanic. The movement itself isn’t entirely unique, but the level design hinges on critical timing. Scattered generously throughout the rest of the demo are pillars marked with black and yellow construction warnings. If you get too close, these pillars will spring up from a resting place in the ground to block your movement. To get around them, you have to dash over them. Timing the dashes starts without much stress, but by the final sections of the demo, I had dialled in the exact dash distance, maybe not down to the pixel, but close, in order to consistently clear spaces in combat scenarios. 

Light and heavy attacks depend much less on timing, although I didn’t find myself using the heavy attack, a ground-pound slam, all that often. However, they run on a similar meter like dashes, in that if you spam light attacks, you could potentially run out of energy and use up a health point for an attack.  Between dashing and attacks, Lonelight kept me on my toes. This isn’t a cosy game, despite the game’s introduction, which makes some of the tonal shifts that much more difficult to understand.

There’s a section in the demo where you traverse a dreamlike setting. It’s beautiful, without a doubt. You’re walking a zigzagging, faded teal path with toys, robots, and unidentified creatures. The path will tunnel you into dead ends, forcing you to turn around in a new direction. This section, like much of the game, isn’t explained. It’s not quite a bridge to the opening segment, and it doesn’t really tie in neatly to what I assume is the game’s present in the dilapidated lab. But it compels me. It’s great to look at and generates a great vibe.

Lonelight closes out its demo with a tanky boss fight. It’s a great assessment of your dashes and ability meter management. I felt satisfied with what Lonelight had to offer, and there is great potential for the full game to sharpen some of the character movement and deliver an excellent final product. 

But I can’t help but wonder what the heck is going on. I know, I know, the mystery kept me engaged and will motivate most players to keep going through the game. The shifts felt more drastic than what I could keep up with, and the carrot got further away from the stick as I progressed through the demo. I look forward to seeing how the game evolves and ties the loose ends together and where all the puzzle pieces end up.

Lonelight is available to wishlist on Steam, with the demo going public soon.