Title of the game checks out, because oh boy is it fucking dark.

A very aggressive playstyle requiring game that scales it's difficulty beautifully. I never felt overpowered, even if I got stronger and better at the game, the enemy variety, different, progressively harder to dodge attacks meant I needed to be on my A game.

Fantastic artstyle, great soundtrack. All of the areas are unique, all of the bosses are extremely well designed (one's are focused on more of a defensive-aggresive playstyle and for other's you just need to utilise every single weapon in your arsenal to even think about taking them down before their health regens).

However, the map is lacking a map and some of the areas are extremely hard to navigate without it (with the aforementioned "no light" everywhere).

All in all, very good game, mucho spice

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for February 2024, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before March 5th, 2024, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

There is No Light. Which is a shame because the art here is great.

There is No Light has players exploring a dark underground area while they fight their way through a horde of enemies. While the game does feel a little like a souls-like there’s an interesting difference where players are supposed to attack to disrupt many enemy attacks, and that’s something I like here. There are tight cramped areas, as well as arenas but the entire time the player is traveling through larger areas with a decent number of waypoints.

However, I’m not sure if the story here is bad, or if I just rushed through it. I'm willing to accept the latter, but I also think that the important beats of the story could have been told better, the cutscenes with no text and just silence didn’t help much. Also while I enjoyed the combat, I’ve heard several people call it simple, and it is at least early on, which is what I like about it, but I feel like that's too reductive.

Pick this up if you want an attack-heavy Souls-like with great graphics but still a bit rough around the edges. I found it entertaining but I also can feel this is going to struggle to find the right audience because it’s not as punishing as Souls-like but still is trying to live in that world. There’s also a LOT of text that you can skip, but you’ll be missing the whole world-building.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/hVGME-pBU7g

I followed this game since some of it's first playtests. Sometimes I believe I am the number one fan of this game. Its hard as hell and I think they shot their selves in the foot with the animated trailer. It does not represent the game at all. The setting is fascinating and I personally love how it exists outside of your character. You don't get answers but it's ok because the stories themselves are so interesting. The art direction is amazing and there is nothing else like it. Please play this game if you are not put off by difficulty and you love unique worldbuilding. Do not believe the animated trailer's lies. It is not a heavy metal murder fest. It is a somber game in a world that is out to get you.

Yo iba a este juego con pavor porque me dijeron que era un "souls", juegos que me suelen aburrir. Hasta en Steam lo pone, pero no entiendo el motivo, comparte poquísimas, pero poquísimas mecánicas con un souls. Las "hogueras" no recuperan a los bichos, una vez mueren están muertos para siempre (a no ser que te maten en el camino a otro punto de guardado, entonces si reaparecen). Tampoco es metroidvania, es bastante lineal, aunque tenga múltiples caminos que llevan a secretos, o a simplemente lore, que aparte del visual, se da en conversaciones, libros, etc. Si, es lioso, pero no lo ocultan precisamente. Tampoco tienes estamina, de hecho el botón de esquivar vas a abusar de él y el juego te pide que abuses porque muchos enemigos atacan 1 vez por segundo y no vas a tener escudo hasta casi acabar el juego (siendo bastante inútil), así que mas te vale apretarlo y golpear cuándo puedas. Tampoco pasa nada si mueres. No tienes almas que perder, vuelves al punto de control y ya, casi todos muy bien colocados y siempre antes de un jefe. En serio no se que le vio la gente de Dark Soul. De hecho tiene mucho, pero mucho más de Hyper Light Drifter con estética malrollera.

Si por algo destaca es por tener buenas ideas, pero que no acaban de estallar todo lo que podrían. Cada jefe es completamente distinto y los combates no duran mas de 30 o 40 segundos. O lo matas o te matan de dos ostias, aquí no hay tanques hasta el "boss final", y tampoco en realidad. Eso no quiere decir que le juego sea difícil, al dejarte reintetarlo un millón de veces simplemente debes esquivar y golpear cuándo puedas, pero siempre dejan huecos, si es que ese boss hay que matarlo a ostias y ya.

Cuándo golpeas llenas una barra que te permite hacer un ataque capaz de interrumpir los golpes enemigos, cosa que te interesa una barbaridad, no por interrumpirlo en si, al segundo siguiente se viene otro, si no porque llenas una barra y al acabarla sueltan un orbe que te cura 1 de los 6 puntos de vida. Parece poco pero eh aquí la cosa. Las curaciones son limitadas. Si mueres no las recuperas y solo puedes llevar 3 o 4 que debes encontrar. Quizás haya 20 o 25 en el juego si te las acabas, mala suerte, vas sin curaciones y san se acabó. Por eso es interesante cargar ese especial, e interrumpir los ataques enemigos, porque llenas dos puntos de esa barra de 5, en lugar de 1 y te puedes curar más frecuentemente. El clásico riesgo/recompensa que creo que está genial hecho. Si te queda 1 punto de vida (o 2 o 3), si, mueres de una ostia, pero es que a la que te aparezcan un par de enemigos ya puedes recuperar otro puntito de vida si lo haces bien, quizás lo suficiente para curarte en el punto de control más cercano.

Otra cosa positiva a destacar es el arte. Es tan asqueroso como precioso. Te vas a hartar de ver ojos por doquier y cosas que ni al fan más pirao de Blasphemus se le ocurrirían. Esto unido a unas buenas animaciones con muchas particulitas y a que cuándo avanzas casi nunca sabes que hay más allá, le da un toque de tensión que le viene genial al juego.

Empezando ya con las cosas malas o que no acabo de entender más bien está el sistema de karma. Puedes hacer algunas misiones crípticas de buscar objetos y dárselos a NPCs en el Hub principal que es una ciudad preciosa. Con esto y en otros momentos donde puedes responderles cosas, obtienes karma positivo o negativo. Se que tener karma positivo es bueno para el final verdadero (luego voy con eso), el problema es que no se si es la traducción, pero a veces no entiendo porque me decía que había sido malvado. Por ejemplo, una persona busca a su hermano y teme que unos caníbales se lo comieran. Si le dices que si, que has visto su cadáver (entre los 15 millones de cadáveres que ves cada 3 metros), te cuenta como algo malo, la respuesta buena es que el se embarque en la misión de intentar buscarlo y muera probablemente en el proceso. Y como esa, muchas.

Tiene un nivel de agua que es basura, pero yendo a lo que no comparten otros juegos, los menús. No ha sido hasta final del juego que he visto que puedes teleportarte a cualquier otro punto de guardado de lo mal hechos que están. tienes inventario, pero no es necesario mirarlo ni una sola vez en todo el juego y menos mal, porque Jesús, menudo mojón. Y da igual, porque tienes tu arma y luego otras dos que te dan (que son bastante, bastante malas), y las cambias con un botón, el menú de equipo no hace falta para nada. Estas armas son útiles ÚNICAMENTE contra un boss en concreto que debes hacerle X daño antes de Y tiempo, y o cambias entre ellas para maximizar el daño entre animaciones, o no te lo pasas.

Antes de dar el mazazo final, o al menos lo ha sido para mi, alguna cosilla buena pequeña. Funciona de putísima madre a dos pantallas (no es frecuente), cada zona está super diferenciada y es agradable conocer que ha pasado ahí investigando NPCs que quieran hablar, lo que ves, etc, y tiene varias representaciones de la religión super bien hechas, desde bastante puntos de vista. Cero quejas ahí.

¿Lo peor? El final. Yo maté al boss final intuyendo que no era el final verdadero. La batalla no estuvo mal, pero el juego acaba de forma abrupta como diciendo: "Bueno, ahora si quieres un final decente, ponte a hacer el true ending". ¿El problema? Que te bloquean zonas donde antes podías pasar, que no tienes indicaciones alguna, que el mapa es tan malo que le pega a mapas más pequeños, y que como ha vendido poco, no hay apenas información sobre como hacerlo correctamente. Me he tirado otras 4 horas para intentar completarlo todo y hacer el true ending con un video que medio lo explicaba y no he sido capaz. No por dificultad, si no por lioso y en serio, ¿a quien coño se le ocurre cerrar zonas sin avisar dejando ahí coleccionables que necesitas? AL final me he rendido y no lo he hecho. Probablemente el juego se merezca algo de más nota, pero es que esas cosas poco aprovechadas y ese final de mierda me lo impide moralmente. Joder, creo que es la review más larga que he hecho. Ale, a pastar.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be found here:
https://youtu.be/wxowZ6Sb28E

I like dark stories, and I think the success of From Software this past decade or so indicates that I’m not alone. Everyone loves an underdog, and there’s no greater challenge than overcoming the impossible. When the world crumbles to dust, that little seedling pushing its way through the rubble at least gives up hope that the next iteration of life won’t make the same mistakes that we did. The writers of these stories do have to practise a bit of restraint in order to create an effectively tragic setting, otherwise their world is just hopeless and even a huge victory seems utterly worthless. Where that line can be drawn is hard to say, and I think different people are going to have different tolerances for misery. I also think Zelart’s There Is No Light has crossed the line. Somewhere between Lovecraft and Glukhovsky, There Is No Light is set below the ruins of a once populous city, now uninhabitable due to some nebulous disaster. The people have been living in the subway tunnels for generations, guided by some self-appointed religious figures who interpret and accommodate an other-worldly being known as “The Great Hand”. The religious fanaticism isn’t confined to the followers of the Hand, and its repeated presence across the whole game definitely added to the notion that humanity is deep into an unrecoverable entropy. It makes me wonder why the player is fighting at all, and I think, unfortunately, that Zelart probably doesn't really know either.

The game opens with a short scene in which the unnamed player character is enjoying a few seconds with his pregnant wife in their home. The sound of a fight can be heard just outside the door, and upon going to investigate, the player character is suckerpunched by a man with strange shoulderpads. His wife is then abducted and carried outside into the carnage. The surrounding tent community is ablaze, the residents murdered by the armoured invaders, and the player character left alone to track down his wife. His dying mother tells the player that his wife has been taken to the Central Station and that they will give his wife and baby to the Hand. As the player makes their way toward the Central Station, they come across more of this mysterious army, as well as a much larger humanoid with a lot more health. Once they’ve defeated this enemy, they hallucinate a strange dark room in which another large man in a blue coat beats the enemy against a wall. The man in blue laughs, and the player is placed back where they were. Further along the path, the player is shown the dilapidated train network that used to run through the tunnels, some other civilian populations living their lives in the ruins, and more armoured people milling around. Upon entering the Central Station, the player sees the throng of people gathered awaiting the tribute ceremony. The gate to somewhere called the Sanctuary opens, and the player is allowed to enter. Inside, a priestly dressed man offers a baby to a hole in the wall, and a tentacle-like hand wriggles free to claim the child. The player character attempts to interfere, at which point he is beaten by the guards and tossed into the corpse pile tunnel. The man in blue appears from the shadows, revives the player, and offers them a sword, a pact signed in blood. A year passes. It’s time for the tribute ceremony again, and Samedi wants this to be the year the Great Hand finally meets their demise. The player returns to the Sanctuary within the Central Station, sneaks behind the curtain, and kills the monstrous deity. In its death throes, the Great Hand sucks 4 coloured lights out of the player character and uses them to seal a nearby door. From here on, the player’s role is to explore the quadrants of the underground, defeat a powerful enemy in each, and reclaim the pieces of their soul. It’s an effective opening that does a lot with very little text. The player is shown their final objective, given a method to achieve it, and introduced to their primary ally moving forward. The fact an entire year passes so suddenly is a bit surprising, but I suppose there needed to be some context given to Samedi’s casual tone throughout the game, as well as the rapidly improved skill set the player character gains as they progress throughout the world. It does lessen the drama of the kidnapping, though. Knowing that a full year has passed without the player character doing anything to fight back, rescue or avenge their wife, or reclaim their soul or whatever seems a bit strange. Perhaps the Great Hand really is that powerful.

The coloured blobs that flew out of the player character were scattered across the underworld, forming parasitic relationships with the most powerful beings they could find and kind of just sitting and waiting to be killed. These enemies wait at the end of long pathways leading from the Central Station, although they branch off of the station in a peculiar way. There’s a northern and southern path, a western path that immediately turns east, and the eastern path that’s more like a downward path. I followed the northern path first, and learned that each of these branches is shockingly formulaic. There’s a bit of a narrative throughline specific to each pathway that doesn’t interact with the others at all, and often these narratives circle back to the same ideas and themes. That being said, while the game is set within subway tunnels beneath a city, the variety among the environments is quite impressive. The Depot in the north is little mor e than a collection of subway tunnels, maintenance access walkways, and a bunch of spiderwebs holding it all together. But as the player continues further along the paths the tunnels disappear and things get more surreal. The New Dawn area is almost an ancient ruin with a writhing red lifeform smeared all over the place. That gives way to a stone temple, and then a series of decadent golden hallways that’d be at home on some kind of bougie science fiction cruiseliner. The abstract environments continue throughout most of the rest of the game too, which is visually great, but makes piecing it all together basically impossible. Also, for a game with such an apocalyptic setting, there are so many people all over the place. There are loads of pilgrims trying to get a grab of their Messiah, there are always a large number of people hanging out at the Central Station, even Nimbus has a big population, enough to mourn for family killed in a war. And I can’t imagine a desperate, starving civilisation somehow churning out this quantity of sculptures and monuments, and then just leaving them around. It makes me wonder how dire the situation really is.

The sculptures are beautiful too. This game is full of wonderful visuals scattered all throughout. Detailed and fascinating monstrous corpses float in the void, little more than the most grotesque plants continue to live in the dark underground, and stunningly opulent architecture spreads like a fungus throughout the entire game. Some of these places aren’t literal, at least I hope not, and eventually repeated exposure to all of the bizarre environments quashed my initial pedantry. It doesn’t matter how these things got here, they’re cool. I think the sound design is very good too. The footstep sounds change depending on the floor material. There’s low humming wherever large machines are spinning away doing whatever. It’s very immersive and done really well. The music is also great, it’s generally very moody and slow, but whenever a fight kicks off someone wheels out the distorted guitar and goes wild for a bit. I do have some gripes, mainly that there are too many songs that feature mostly a single, lonely piano. While that is good, it gives off too much of a Hollow Knight feel. A couple of songs are a little uncanny in that way and I could swear I heard Resting Grounds in there at one stage. Hollow Knight doesn’t own melancholic piano but it was definitely suspicious. The combat sounds are pretty good too. The fights can become quite chaotic, but the excellent sound design makes even the most hectic battlefield readable at the very least. The enemy sprites are also mostly good, though it’s probably the weakest aspect of the presentation overall. There are a lot of different enemies in this game, and they’re all visually very impressive, but too often things won’t layer over each other particularly well. There Is No Light doesn’t often swarm the player with enemies, but there are instances where the screen can become very noisy and the player character gets buried beneath a pile of attack particles and enemies bunching up. Some enemies also look quite similar to each other, making determining which should be the first the player targets difficult.

The combat takes up the largest portion of total play time, and while it is okay, it has a lot of problems. The player starts the game with one sword which has a two-hit combo and an instant activation special attack. Eventually, they’ll gain access to additional weapons, which can all be upgraded a fair bit too. There’s quite a lot going on within most fights so I’ll just run through it so we’re all up to speed. Whenever an enemy attacks a small halo appears above them, colour-coded to indicate the property of the attack. If the halo is red, the following attack can be nullified by dealing damage to the enemy. If the halo is yellow the attack can only be interrupted by a special attack, and if the halo is white the attack cannot be stopped at all. Most attacks in the game are yellow, red attacks are so rare that it’s almost a non-mechanic. In order to use a special move, the player’s Rage bar must have adequate charge. Rage is built by connecting normal attacks with an enemy but it dissipates over time. In the early game, enemies die so fast that it’s unlikely to ever have enough Rage to use special attacks which can get the player thinking that the entire halo system is totally useless, that they might as well just dodge everything instead. In the later stages the ability to cancel enemy attacks is handy, but it does take a few seconds of slashing at an enemy in order to gain Rage in the first place. There’s also another layer to special attacks that doesn’t really matter as the impact is so small, but I’ll mention it anyway. For each special attack landed, this counter in the upper left corner increases. Once it maxes out, the next special attack will cause a healing orb to spawn that heals one health if the player manages to hit it with their sword. This basically never matters, but it’s there. Most attacks deal 2 damage per hit so healing 1 health once every two or three battles is negligible. There’s also another colour-coded system involved in the game’s combat. Hopefully this isn’t getting too confusing. Each pip on an enemy’s health bar can either be red or white. Red health is standard video game health, while white health regenerates. To prevent white health from returning, all of the white health in a line must be removed within the same combo. The game uses this to gate off certain quest stages and locations behind damage challenges that require optimised attacking strategies. I think this is a good way to encourage the player to use all of the tools they have, but the number of enemies that just have 2 or 3 pips of white health is really high, so it’s rare to ever see this mechanic actually mean anything. It’s easy enough to just mash through. For the most part, the player needs to figure out an enemy’s attack rhythm and get hits whenever they can. In time, I learned to attack quickly before an enemy’s attack came out, dodge into a position where I could attack again, and then move away from the enemy to see what its next action would be. This seems like an effective strategy, but there’s an unfortunate input buffer that often causes some of those attack and dodge inputs to combine into dodge attacks that lands the player in danger. In most cases, slamming face first into an enemy is pretty bad, they mostly deal a minimum of 2 damage per attack, and healing resources are surprisingly limited.

Aside from the healing orb the player earns via hitting special attacks, there are other ways to regain health. The game has a similar checkpoint system to the Souls bonfires, although instead it's a big worm that the player heals and levels up at. The player can teleport between any of these that they’ve already come across, although they aren’t the only places the player respawns upon death. They also don’t refill any healing resource, just the player’s health. In order to gain healing charges, the player needs to find them in the world. They typically grow from small plants which the player can harvest once and then never again. The only way to gain a replenishing source of healing charges is to purchase a shrine that appears whenever the player dies in an area enough times. This costs a tiny bit of Karma, which is easy to gain and only ever used for unlocking an ending and the occasional shortcut door. The shrine also only spawns one healing charge per death, so while it is possible to carry the maximum of three charges, the player has to teleport around to all of the other shrines they’ve unlocked to get more. Most of the bosses seem to be balanced around the player bringing zero healing charges to the battle, which definitely makes sense since they fully heal the player and the player can quickly skip any animation associated with activating them. I don’t think I used many healing charges while exploring the world, but the bosses certainly ate them up. As far as balance for the bosses, I feel like the vast majority of them are good challenges, even if I might not care for whatever mechanic has been introduced for the player to try and overcome. The fights can be a little grindy at times, but I don’t mind getting punished for making mistakes. In games like this, it usually takes me a handful of attempts to really understand what the fight is asking me to do, and then I form a plan of attack and overcome the challenge. There Is No Light has that level of challenge and puzzle-solving, but whenever the player dies a certain number of times to a boss this giant text box appears at the top of the screen to tell the player there’s an easy mode. I don’t want to play the easy mode, the difficulty selection strictly said that this was the intended level of challenge. If this could’ve been disabled somewhere then this wouldn’t be an issue, but it cannot be turned off. One of the last things anyone wants to see as they’re struggling with a difficult encounter is someone telling them to turn the difficulty down. Get that away from me, please. The majority of traversal through levels isn’t even challenging, the game is fairly easy until the bosses show up, at which point there might be a bit of resistance, and then suddenly the game wants to patronise you.

Of the three paths open to the player at the start, I went north first, to the old train depot. The spiders have taken over the tunnels here, capturing would-be citizens to take back to their village and rip off their faces so they may live in peace. It’s a bit of a strangely violent facet to an apparently peaceful community. This inconsistent characterisation of the spiders also extends to them constantly attacking the player as they make their way through the tunnels. If they’re friendly, why are they attacking? Beyond the spiders’ lair, is the New Dawn area with its tribe of blood-crazed humans and their leader Corelia, and then the Great Archive further along the path. The people who were living in the Archive soon after the apocalypse were experimenting with demonic summoning, and accidentally summoned a number of beasts they weren’t able to control. Some knew that the demons would eventually break away and likely kill everyone in the Archive, but these detractors were ostracised and even killed by the more fanatical people around them. It’s a relatively strong route that stands out as the only one without the religious zealotry theme, but it is much more disjointed than the other routes.

I went south next, through the village of Nimbus, toward the old warzone in the tunnels beyond. The people don’t have many options for food underground, but a substance known as Wax had been discovered and it had just enough nutritional value to serve as a food source. The Wax is flavourless and viscous, and nobody really knew where it came from. Some started to believe that the Wax had some kind of depressing qualities, that they would eventually become mindless drones doing exactly as ordered by the Church of the Great Hand who seemed to have an unlimited supply of the Wax. After some time, a group splintered from the Church and travelled into the south tunnels in order to establish a new, Wax-less colony, with their own army called the Lunar Order. The Church was not pleased to see its followers abandon their faith and decided to wage war against the Lunar Order. The player travels through the old fortifications on their way to a facility referred to as The Sarcophagus. It’s essentially a giant, impenetrable prison that the Lunar Order tried to seal themselves inside, and while they were mostly successful, the desperation that led their leader to make this choice drove him mad. His insanity is physically manifested just outside the walls of the Sarcophagus, and the player gets to see the steps he took in order to get to this stage. It’s a cool series of levels, though the interior of the Sarcophagus is a little underwhelming by comparison. It’s mostly a return to the dilapidated environments the rest of the game is composed of, which isn’t bad, it just looks a little plain next to the madness just outside.

The third path I followed was the west road. Along this road are a number of camps from which a group of pilgrims are making their way toward their Messiah and his house of safety. The pilgrims are having a bit of an internal crisis, however. Someone seems to be messing with their signs and causing some people to get lost in the tunnels. One of whom is a woman and her baby, who she hopes the Messiah has some method of helping. There are a few events along the path to the Messiah where the player helps to protect this mother and her child from a bunch of enemies that show up to attack her. I don’t know what happens if she’s killed here, I won this event every time it showed up. One of the biggest challenges the pilgrims must face while travelling is the awfully inconvenient village full of cannibals that has been set up along the road. The cannibals clearly spent a long time decorating their village; there are potted plants, painted murals, wall hangings, and colourful streamers all throughout, as well as the cages filled with people that the player can’t release at all. This might be kind of racist. Beyond the village is the final push before reaching the outskirts of the Messiah’s palace. There’s a cave on the path in which the player must fight a copy of themself to demonstrate their willingness to overcome their faults or whatever, and then the player gets to see the hell that awaits most of the people trying to make their way to this place. For a reason that is never explained, the Messiah’s army captures and tortures a large number of the pilgrims. They’ve constructed a massive elevator that descends down into the torturous pit to move large groups of unwitting people all at once. I really don’t know why they’d do this. Eventually, the player comes across the main structure, fights a really unusual boss, and then gains access to the Messiah’s home. Just inside the main door, a gigantic machine lowers and emits an extremely powerful light, blinding everyone. The player’s vision is saved by Samedi, but all of the other people who had come to worship the Messiah are blinded. These people lay strewn about within the halls of the Messiah’s palace, still devout and desperate to find their idol, but now with their eyes burning in their heads. No prizes for guessing who the main boss of this area is. The Messiah does seem to have access to the surface, and it is bleak up there. Again, I don’t know what the Messiah gains from treating his worshippers this way. What good is a huge cohort of blind people in this terribly violent world? The fallout of killing the Messiah is never shown either, which I guess is fair.

Finally, the east path which only opens after the first three have been cleared, leads to another settlement filled with corpses. The city was once the most prosperous settlement in the underground, but things suddenly collapsed one day after the leadership abdicated all of their duties to an AI. The leadership had always planned to put the AI in charge, and while things were going well in the beginning, the AI inevitably succumbed to the tropes we all saw coming. Its primary objective was to protect human life, so it inevitably resorted to putting all of its subjects into stasis spheres so they couldn’t harm themselves or each other. It’s really obvious that this is what happened, but the game gently hints at it at most. All the holograms, and the humanoid shapes inside the spheres floating around and stuff. It couldn’t be more obvious. The boss here is also rather underwhelming. But with this area cleared, the player can finally return to the Sanctuary, enter the gate to the surface and see what the church had been keeping from the people all along.

There are a lot of boss encounters in this game, 28 in total, and they are mostly tough challenges. I criticised Eastern Exorcist a while back because I thought it had way too many bosses. It took me almost 10 hours to beat both narratives within Eastern Exorcist, and in that time I fought 31 different bosses. With the reused bosses added in, that game had an average of 3.5 bosses per hour, which makes There Is No Light’s 1.4 bosses per hour look far more reasonable. And there aren't any rematches. The quality of the bosses is also generally much higher. Most bosses have chunks of red health separated by white health pips. Some of these sort of act like phase changes, or damage checks before the real fight starts. I think the fight against Shedim is the most emblematic of the majority of encounters in the game so I’ll be covering it in detail, though there are a bunch of bosses that don’t fulfil the same boss fight style, and none use the same mechanics that Shedim does. Shedim is a demonic gryphon which mostly attacks by charging at the player and slashing with its giant claws. The arena is mainly clear of obstacles, and the crystal clusters that are present break whenever they take damage or the player dashes into them. Shedim cycles through its attacks, generally favouring the multi-part dash attack, but it won’t hesitate to slash at a nearby player, or teleport charge at a distant player. The fight is super fast paced as Shedim is very aggressive, and it’s unlikely for the player to ever get more than one hit on the boss between its attacks. The gryphon also has a fairly decent chunk of red health, but the last 2 hits have to be done in sequence in order to win. Most other bosses in the game are just as aggressive as Shedim, and they can kill the player super quickly if the player makes a mistake. I enjoy bosses designed this way, but the input buffer combining an attack and a dash together sometimes makes some of the hits the player takes feel a little unfair. Fortunately, there’s a respawn point right outside of the door so new attempts were quick to start. Also, the fight isn’t especially long. When I succeeded in defeating Shedim, the fight only took around 40 seconds to finish. At this point the boss stands up on its hind legs, sprouts a couple of extra arms, and a long golden tongue extends from its mouth. Avarice has about twice the health Shedim had, as well as a series of white pips to work through. It is also just as aggressive as Shedim and has a full-screen attack that requires a well-timed dodge to avoid damage. Fortunately, Avarice is much easier to hit than Shedim so it’s possible to beat this second form down in only thirty seconds or so. But, yeah. Most bosses in this game are similar to this. They’ll have something that makes them stand out among the other bosses, but they’re basically never boring and can be defeated in a matter of seconds. One might be in a room full of poison gas that the player has to manage by venting throughout the fight, one might remove the floor from beneath the player’s feet as the fight goes on so they have to keep mobile, one might change its name a bunch while you’re fighting it. The secret final fight is pretty middle of the road, so don’t be too discouraged if you can’t figure out how to access it.

I’ve touched on it a few times, but I think this game has gone too far in exemplifying how bad its world is. An apocalypse on the surface forced the population into the subway, where they’ve been living for generations. The most prosperous community is lorded over by a dictatorial theocracy whose deity demands yearly child sacrifices. The Church of the Great Hand strips the humanity from its warriors through some kind of ritualistic torture, and it enforces a rigid power hierarchy within an arbitrarily defined upper and lower class. I don’t really understand why wealth matters in this world where might-makes-right, if all the upper class people were members of the ecclesiarchy or something then it’d make sense, but there’s just like, rich guys here. Nearby is a slum for the sick and disabled outcasts of the Central Station who just have to live in squalor because The Great Hand said so, I guess. The Church waged war against a splinter of itself, the Lunar Order, who believed that the Wax the Church was feeding to people was causing them to lose their free will. That Lunar Order then developed a strain of the Wax that could cure any ailment a person may be suffering from or it could violently transform them into a lumbering purple zombie. Failure to administer this Black Wax to his mother caused the leader of the Lunar Order to grieve so hard his sadness physically manifested in the tunnels he used to rule. There’s all these desperate people dying as they try to reach someone they’ve been led to believe can save them from the horrors of living under the Church, and then that Messiah tortures and blinds those people just because. There’s another tribe of humans who’ve eaten the writhing fleshy mass on the walls of the New Dawn region who’re now mutated and have excessive, violent urges they never had before. There was a library full of people casting torturous demon magic on each other out of suspicious spite until they all killed each other. A lionised AI decided to pacify and cocoon all of its charges in amniotic bubbles, then kill everyone that it felt it couldn’t control. The one place in the game that claims to be looking out for the people’s best interests captures its future residents against their will, and then tears their faces off so nobody can judge each other or something. And don’t expect this place of relative peace to stick around. The Church launches a raid on Spiritina to try and scare the spiders away from their territory. Even the endings are bleak. The player character travelled this whole world, slayed giant demons and wicked false prophets, and, in the end, it was all for nothing. The citizens of the Central Station mount a revolution against the Church, but whether they succeed or not doesn’t really matter. The player can help to defend the spider village from attack, but either way the result will be the same, the spiders have to leave to find somewhere safer to live, or they die. The only person who seems to win at all is Samedi, but he was just fine watching the humans destroy each other anyway. Maybe he wanted to be worshipped too, but he could’ve just deified himself anyway. There are clearly people desperate enough to follow evil tyrants already, Samedi could just become the new Messiah.

I spent about 19 hours with There Is No Light, though I didn’t stick to the main quest the entire time. There are a few side quests to do, as well as a lot of little nooks to explore for lore or experience points. The side quests are all fetch quests, though some of them have multiple steps or involve fighting secret bosses that couldn’t have been encountered before. They’re entertaining enough, and it’s easy to find the quest items when exploring through an area anyway. I do think this game is about one quarter too long. When I unlocked the east path that leads down to the AI controlled city, I expected that to be the end of the game. I was kind of done with the game at this stage, I didn’t think it could include any more interesting enemies or challenges and if it had stopped at 14 hours I’d have been more than satisfied with the length. The final city environment is cool, and the visual designs of the enemies are really well done. They have a new mechanic where the player has to defeat the nucleus after destroying the primary enemy to stop them from regenerating. But this isn’t much different to any other enemy in the game. You still just slash at them and dodge their attacks like everyone else. The rampant AI bundling up the humans it's been designed to protect is a good cliche, I think there’s still some novelty in it at this point, but it is still a cliche. In my eyes, Zelart could’ve chopped this area off and the game would be better for it. They could even sell it as DLC later on if they really wanted to include it in the game.

I’d still say that There Is No Light is worth playing if this type of game appeals to you. It’s tough and nihilistic, but it’s mechanically very solid. If you aren’t already into this style of game, I don’t think There Is No Light will do anything to sway you. It’s solid, but it isn’t breaking any new ground.

Not every story has a happy ending, and I don’t think There Is No Light necessarily needed one, but I don’t think every part of its world needed to be crawling in agony. The player character almost immediately gets revenge for the deaths of his wife and child, and for the rest of the story he’s just killing big monsters and returning trinkets to regain his soul and memories. That’s just something that sort of happens to him and acts as a motivation because he was already done before. While on this journey of self-repair, the player gets to see how hopeless the world is. How the most powerful among us, who claim they’re working in our best interests, are actually monsters, choking what little life is left out for their own gain. How attempts to place our trust in some messianic being, be they person or machine, will inevitably lead to our own destruction. We can convince ourselves to be grateful when we’ve been blinded to the truth. We can sign all responsibility and freedoms over for our own good, and be imprisoned by the consequences. We can mourn for the old days, before everything went wrong. But we can’t fix it, even if we really want to… Except, in reality, we can. It’s scary and dangerous, but if enough people band together, we can change that oppressive regime. We can revolt. Or secede. Collective action is much more powerful than those lording over us would ever admit. It’s why big companies hate unions so much. If we stopped doing what our bosses tell us to, what can they do? If we don’t enforce the rules that we agree are terrible, what will they do? As citizens, we can unite. As humans, we can unite. The world can be brighter. There Is No Light is too dark.

Speaking of a brighter world.