PREVIEW: Light Apprentice

Light Apprentice is a game that hit Early Access last month, which boasts the interesting idea of an RPG set in a comic book presentation.

Despite the title, the game claims to be fully complete and only requires some time in EA to tune it up a bit. I believe this so far, since I haven’t encountered any bugs or problems playing. However, I do have some issues with the game itself.

The story starts off a bit vague, but centers around Ethan, the titular Light Apprentice who’s awoken from a long slumber – 300 years, to be exact – to find a war has rendered his planet almost dead. Only by finding four other apprentices he was a part of can it be rejuvenated.

Gameplay:

Light Apprentice gameplay is split into two halves: ‘Adventure Mode’, which is a sort of point and click interface where you solve some simple puzzles (which thankfully don’t seem to be pixel hunts), and then battles, which are all scripted encounters. Fights are also pretty simple turn-based affairs, with the complication that you can either kill or spare the enemy. The latter involves defending and letting them hit you, which tires them out if you land a timing mini-game as they attack. Once all of them are tired out at once, a command ends the fight.

I found myself doing that more than anything else since it’s effectively a reliable insta-kill, and it’s a bit more interesting than just straight-up fighting them. It’s also intrinsically safer than outright combat when it relies on defending. Seems like they were going for an Undertale sort of thing, but your opponents in this so far are all generic monsters that deliberately try to kill you, making me less inclined to spare them if it weren’t so effective. It seems to imply sticking with one style or the other will change what Ethan can do in battle, but so far the stuff he’s learned has only been through choices in cutscenes.

Graphics:

Their claim about the game looking like a comic book holds up: the cutscenes are well-drawn and the ‘panels’ flow together like an actual comic. The models used in adventure mode and the battles are decent as well, but not quite as appealing.

Music:

Pretty good actually. There seem to be only a few tracks, but most of them are good at setting tone and getting you into what’s going on. The battle music is nice to listen to in particular, which is good since you’re obviously going to be hearing it a lot.

Ultimately it’s not a bad game, and harmless enough (I’d certainly rather see an RPG like this get onto Steam than another default-asset RPG Maker game), but it didn’t draw me in that much. I’d say if any of this sounds up your alley though, give it a try. If you do enjoy it, it seems like it’ll be a fairly meaty game once complete, since at the moment it only contains Volume 1, which has five chapters. I hope that works out for them.