The Vale: Shadow of the Crown - XBSX Review

The Vale: Shadow of the Crown by developer Falling Squirrel Inc. and publishers Falling Squirrel Inc. and Creative Bytes Studios—Microsoft Xbox Series X review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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There are certain titles out in the world that can only be described as an experience. Coming from developer and publisher Falling Squirrel Inc., The Vale: Shadow of the Crown is one such title as you’ll be exploring a medieval world with nothing more than the sounds of the world as your guide.

Blind from birth, you’ll be helping to guide our protagonist Alex home after her escort was ambushed by an invading horde as she was on her way to her new home after her brother ascended to his crown. Second-born, blind, and wanting to give her more than he had, Alex’s uncle found a place that could be hers but unfortunately with tragedy striking and having no idea where this place is, Alex turns around to where they traveled from to make a five hundred mile journey home with nothing more than the clothes on her back and the blade from a dead soldier that she stumbled upon in her hand.

The Vale from the very beginning is different from anything that I’ve ever sat down to as there is next to nothing to see past the opening credits of the developer, publisher and of the main menu. From this point, just about everything short of a map and particle effects is audio only with clear, crisp enunciations and sound effects that are only heightened by the fact that there’s nothing else for you to see as you begin to help guide Alex home. Playing with your eyes closed, the television off, or with a blindfold, each of these and a VERY good pair of headphones will almost be necessary as you’ll want to cut out any other noise source such as fans, cars driving by, air conditioning units or cats complaining that food time is still an hour away.

Starting out alone and with nothing more than a blade, Alex soon comes across a wounded shepherd running from the invading horde that caused this whole adventure for her in the first place. After taking out those that would have killed her and then the shepherd outright, Alex promises the shepherd an almost immeasurable reward if he can help to bring her home. Setting out together, you’ll soon have to make choices for the now party of two as one has an injury and the other can only go by what she hears in the world.

Not being able to see anything as you move about the world is an interesting concept that was very well detailed from the side of the developer. Set up in a form of situations that will follow each other from being out of the road to being inside of town or a cave, the space that you can move about is generally contained to the task at hand. This lets you only have to worry about what’s around you as you could also easily be attacked at a moment’s notice. Sounds of running water, the ring of a smith’s hammer on the anvil, a herbalist calling out, the buzzing of bees, each of these is honed in on will help guide you forward.

Having these almost bite sized areas alleviated what would have been my biggest worry and question going into this. How do you find your way forward when you can't see and you yourself have never had to live a day in those shoes? Where do you even start? So it's with this in mind that you are almost hand held through the early parts of the adventure as you are guided to how to move around, how to interact and most importantly for this adventure, how to fight and defend yourselves as Alex will unfortunately often have to draw steel.

On that note, combat while simplistic in its approach steadily gets more complicated as you add in more and more "noise". While Alex has been trained to listen for particular sounds, eventually there will be more than you know how to deal with as the odds are you've never been in these shoes. The sound of one set of feet crunching on the ground quickly becomes many alongside the sounds of creaking armor as someone heads in for a swing. Add in the sound of whistling arrows and the variety of attacks to block and I wouldn't blame someone for falling the first few times. It's very well done, but it's not easy and that I believe was the point.

For combat itself, you'll be navigating both your left and right thumb sticks. The left stick controls your Shield whether it be protecting you from a centered, left or right position while the right thumbstick does the same but for your sword. Being the best way of defense, your Shield will often allow you to parry an enemy's attack leaving you an opening to strike back. You can of course strike first however as you get more and more enemies involved it was usually better to turtle a bit and return strikes instead of striking first.

It works very well and I often found myself closing my eyes to concentrate on nothing more than the sounds around me. If there is perhaps one thing that would have made everything so much more complicated, and would have been more realistic, it would have been to have sounds coming from behind you and have to worry about protecting yourself from behind. On that note though, I'm happy I only had to worry about the absolute positions of center, left and right.

While combat is a big part of the experience, it really comes down to everything that has been perfectly described from items in the inventory and items in the main settings to the conversations that Alex will have with others. Alex has never seen what the world looks like so the concept of color is lost when the shepherd was trying to describe what a hill looks like at sunset. Just that alone is something we probably also never even considered as we do take our sight for granted most days. So it’s with this, the lengthy descriptions of the items in Alex’s inventory, and referring to portions of the controller as what they are and not “A” “X” “Y” but left sticks and triggers that can easily allow someone without their sight to sit down and enjoy The Vale as it’s an adventure that takes visual disabilities to the forefront of the thought process.

As a side note, having used assistive software such as JAWS and NV Access (NonVisual Desktop Access) to check various accessibility aspects of HTML and forms, I found myself blown away at the level of clarity that the narrator had in describing everything. I had an idea of what to expect based off of previous tools designed to aid those with visual disabilities but what Falling Squirrel Inc. have done was simply incredible and adaptable as you move through menus from one item or system setting to another.

Summary

Overall, I can’t recommend Falling Squirrel Inc.’s The Vale: Shadow of the Crown enough. It’s more than just a video game, it’s an experience that blends in a real world issue with a well balanced gameplay system that just works. Well written and narrated story mixed with an easy to pick up yet hard to master combat system all while seeing nothing more than particle effects on a screen, it’s a reminder that there’s still so much more we can do for those with disabilities.

Score: 8.75 / 10

 

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Gleamlight - XB1 Review

Gleamlight by developer DICO and publisher D3 Publisher—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Gleamlight is something that caught my eye a while back while it was still under Steam’s Early Access label. Here was a 2D “soulslike” inspired adventure built in a world of gorgeous stained glass which has you platforming your way with nothing short of your own intuition. Gleamlight has no tutorials, no HUDs and ZERO help. It honestly had everything that it needed to raise the bar on the style, however like the stained glass it looks like, there’s a fragile balance to its features and unfortunately the glass couldn’t quite hold up to the heat of the oven.

Going in I knew several things. The first, is that there were zero instructions and I would need to figure everything out which was fine as most of the buttons do what you think they should do. Attack. Jump. Move left or right. As you progress you’ll learn new abilities that simply require poking at every button on the controller to see what was unlocked and then figure out how to best use it. Dodging, double jumping, rocket boosting higher or increased attack power with a second sword that is picked up. The second thing that I knew was that I had to play past the credits as there was “more” to the adventure. "Several" times actually.

The adventure, or adventures if you consider that each portion has a beginning and an end, are not very long. Less than an hour per segment, finding myself at the first set of credits I had to wonder if that could really be it? Even if not very long, Gleamlight, while gorgeous to look at, feels rather bland which is very unfortunate because it has different enemy types trying to kill you. It has some interesting elements such as the zero help, no head’s up displays for health or minimaps. Where it falls short is that the platforming puzzles are just too easy and you literally just have to walk from one area to the other and hit anything in sight because what could have been one Gleamlight’s greatest features, was perhaps its biggest detriment.

Instead of having “health”, you instead have light behind the glass that makes up your character. If you get hit, you lose light and the enemy absorbs it. If you hit the enemy, you take that light back. It basically ends once there’s no more light inside and either you or them will crumble to the ground. Having a life leeching ability like that from the very beginning just made everything way too easy as it even turns most boss fights into a twenty second slugfest as there’s no fear of dying once you take out their protective crystals. They hit you, you lose light, you become invincible, you swing three times faster than they do and grab back what was lost and more and then the boss crumbles to the ground. Totalling only a few bosses between the start and the first credits? There had to be more.

And there is. Once you’ve gone down the path of the first adventure, you’ll be making your way back up for the second with new abilities and harder enemies to fight against. This second path had the difficulty that I had expected to encounter from the beginning. The platforming was more challenging, the enemies were more dangerous because of where they were placed, and some bosses couldn’t exactly be tanked because of how they moved around the map. That said, because of the life leeching on both sides, some fights just went on and on as the boss wouldn’t stay put and by the time you made it over to them, they were already back on the other side of the map and had spawned even more minions.

It lacked a sense of balance and I found myself at the second set of credits wondering… what awaits the third, and, already feeling a bit annoyed at the slugfests, how’s it going to play out? That, I'll let you find out on your own!

There are a lot of good ideas, but just with the life leeching ability alone, a lot of the danger is removed because “who cares if I get hit, I’ll just take it back”. There are more enemies than you often know what to do with or want to even bother with by this point. Most of them are just in the way from points A to B. The puzzle solving is too basic as it requires only hitting one or three switches and then moving through the doorway into the next zone to do the same all over again.

Now everything all said and done, I've sunk a lot of time into this to try for the real endings and full gamerscore. As it stands now I'm just missing dying 100 times and some secret boss that I cannot seem to find. There's a hidden charm for sure, but it's never enough to get past the issues listed above.

Summary

So overall, Gleamlight is a good testing ground for a different kind of adventure but unfortunately some of its more unique ideas are what does it in. Gorgeous to look at, there’s simply no challenge to the combat and the platforming never really becomes complex enough to “make you sweat”. Adding in that the puzzle solving is extremely basic and I’m glad that it only took a few hours to go through because it all started to feel rather repetitive.

That said, I’m hoping to see more in the vein of Gleamlight down the line with perhaps more refined features and a harder difficulty such as two hits and you’re out which would increase the stress of your decisions and the difficulty dramatically.

Score: 6 / 10

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Solo - PC Review

Steam describes Solo as “an introspective puzzler set on a gorgeous and surreal archipelago”. This game was suggested to me due to it’s visual similarities to Yonder: Cloud Catcher Chronicles. I was eager to play given the unique premise and art style, and I was immediately impressed by the options available for character creation - this is the first game (that I have played) that allows same sex relationships while also allowing you to change gender at any point in the game.

Plot

I think “plot” is a strong word. There isn’t really a clear story, because it is closer to a “choose your own” rather than an established narrative. But the game doesn’t really give you anything to work towards, or any semblance of progression - which why after 6 hours of playing, I have idea how close I am to the end. When you get past a puzzle, you get a new question from a totems, then a remark from your ghost partner, and then you move to a new island and solve another puzzle. You eventually hit a lighthouse, and then move on to a new section of islands.

Given that I only played as a female in a same-sex relationship, I can’t speak for other players or plotlines. The questions may or may not differ. The essential premise of the story, I think, is to learn more about how you love, but I was really discouraged by some of the remarks made by my ghost partner. There’s something about a guilt-trip that really takes you out of the game, ya know? They encourage you to be honest in the responses you give, but I wasn’t expecting to be judged for it.

Gameplay

The game is controller supported, but it assumes you are using an XBOX controller, which is standard. I didn’t have one on hand, so I used a PS4 controller. It worked out fine, as long as I was able to remember the corresponding buttons.

As I mentioned, there isn’t a lot of variety in the gameplay. You get to an island, you use a few types of boxes to find a way to reach the totems and then start all over again. You get a camera (mostly to take selfies, which I totally did), you can play the guitar (to change the weather or to remove color, for example), and you can feed the animals if you so desire.

The animals are really cute, so I fed them anytime I came across one. The parachute is handy, but aside from that, the accessories really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The guitar is finicky, and you can’t always tell if you have been successful in playing the tune. You aren’t reminded of the note pattern, so it would be worthwhile to write it down. Random NPCs will ask for a favor, and sometimes you need to help animals or plants, but it seemed that I was able to skip these sections without any penalty.

I had a bit of a tough time trying to accurately place the boxes, especially the sticky ones. On numerous occasions it would prevent certain boxes from being placed next to other ones, but after 3 more attempts, it would work. The camera angles aren’t great, so I frequently had to drop boxes and try again to be able to place them at the angle I wanted. You can’t really look “up” in the game, which is quite frustrating.

The game seems to have only an autosave and not a specific save point. Nowhere was it explicitly stated how to save. There was a fountain I could drink out of but I have no clue how or if it affected the game. After playing for an hour or so, I waited for the autosave to run, and then quit the game. When I restarted shortly after, my character was spawned in the middle of the ocean and the screen was entirely blue. The only way I was able to regain control was by pulling out my guitar and it reset the screen enough that I could to swim back to a shore miles from where I had just auto-saved. Luckily, this only happened that once and future restarts were unproblematic.

Overall

The game definitely has a some unique qualities, including the premise and the gender considerations. If you enjoy puzzle games and are entertained by repetition in a very pretty setting, then this might be right up your alley. Unfortunately, these few good elements really don’t outweigh or make up for the glitches and lack of compelling story. That being said, I won’t give up completely - I’d like to know how it ends. Hopefully some improvements will be made upon release.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Team Gotham
Publisher(s):
Team Gotham
Genre(s):
Adventure
Puzzle
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
NA

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Lauren

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