She and the Light Bearer is a visually stunning game that’s billed by its store page as a combination of point-and-click and Music Album, which intrigued me while raising some questions. The detail evident in its screenshots make it look more like a Hidden Object game, and I’ve seen the two genres referred to interchangeably before, but the music album detail further eludes an immediate understanding of what exactly one can expect. After playing She and the Light Bearer for something like an hour, the best way I can explain it is to say that it’s a narrative-focused, delightfully cheery blend of genres that incorporates the stylistic flair of hidden object games, the underlying progression of point-and-clicks, and the sense of place that a well designed (and delightfully acoustic) soundtrack can provide. It doesn’t take long to become enchanted by this one.
She and the Light Bearer begins with some children weaving baskets for an upcoming coming of age celebration with varying levels of enthusiasm, only for their grandmother to show up and tell them a story to reaffirm the importance of the event. This provides an opportunity to explain the game’s underlying mythology, where a creator figure called The Mother went to sleep, only for her creation to become less perfect in her absence. You play as a firefly (the Light Bearer) tasked with investigating a forest in the hopes of finding her.
It doesn’t take long before you’ve become acquainted with the variety of bizarre personalities occupying said forest, and they always seem to have tests that you have to pass in order to continue deeper toward your goal. Thus far, the gameplay has been almost entirely comprised of speaking with these characters and occasionally using found objects where they’re most appropriate, but these are things that She and the Light Bearer does exceptionally well because of the charm of the setting and characters. The forest even changes in subtle ways as you make progress, hinting at a sort of decay that’ll no doubt become a factor in the story later on.
As for She and the Light Bearer‘s writing, I’m finding it pretty exceptional overall. Characters have abundant personality and all kinds of little quirks made more charming by their accompanying arsenal of different expressions and unique speaking voices (they speak gibberish, but not so much that it becomes fatiguing), and the game alternates between non-voiced narration written to be poetically abstract and the more conversational dialogue between the Light Bearer and forest dwellers. There was one particularly strange moment when a character acts like “mother” and “bother” rhyme despite having different O sounds, but I haven’t found anything else to distract from the underlying charm of the experience.
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