The Light that Binds Us

an amazing game loved this alot :)

Beautiful game ! It was a pleasure to discover the short story. Have to try it if you have some time !

Simple but fun puzzle game

The good (possible spoilers): Manipulate light so that the shadows turn into solid geometry and help you navigate the world, I really, really like that idea! The music is soothing, the graphics are very nice. At first there was some music stutering in the menu (!), I suspect background loading, but overall this was a very smooth experience, at least graphically. I wish those would have been enough to motivate me to continue, but … The bad (aiming to be constructive): Controls. You make a game for PC but do not include proper keyboard and mouse controls. “Best played on controller” is a message that instantly halves my interest in the game. And I’m not being PC elitist, kb&m are simply my preference. And the keyboard defaults!!! Forward Z, Left Q and Right D??? Z is below S (the latter is default in 99% of the games), so forward feels like backward, and Q isn’t even on the same row as D (also the latter is usually default)! Who thought that was a good idea??? I suspect French keyboard layout (AZERTY) but the world does not consist of or revolve around France only. Check the windows config and change to QWERTY when necessary. Or at least put a forced AZERTY/QWERTY choice on first startup. If I hadn't checked the settings before playing I would have been terribly confused (and annoyed). Thankfully, you made it easy enough to change and I understand this may be a student project, but for a paid game that would be a quit/refund moment right there. Camera. You already seem to have (near) 360 degree camera movement, but it’s reserved for the game. Why not allow the player to pan around and admire this beautiful world you’ve created? A missed opportunity, to be sure. Many people still care about player agency. Narration. The end of eternity? Then it isn’t eternity, is it? Try ‘purgatory’ instead. You may think I’m nitpicking, but here’s the thing: if you make a narrative game, you need to deploy the right words, the narrative needs to make sense. Words are important. Show you care about your story enough to make sense because, if you appear to not care, why should the gamer? Overall I think this is an interesting and beautiful looking project but there’s too much jank and bad first impressions for me to want to go much beyond the mandatory 15 minutes playtime just so that I can review this. Josh Strife Hayes has a very good video up on YouTube about quit moments in gaming. I recommend it. I hope these critiques are received in the spirit in which they were written and helped you learn something. I look forward to discovering your next project, but this one is a pass for me. Edit: I just noticed this: system requirements are Intel and nVidia only. AMD not a thing where you're from? That would have caused me to skip this altogether, had I noticed it before downloading.

Camera angles making it hard to judge jumps and the shadows being a little slippery when you land on them made the game more difficult than it should be, but they weren't bad enough to ruin the game or anything. It was decent. The graphics, sound design, and story were all really nice. The rest was functional, but nothing special. It's definitely worth checking out, especially since it takes less than half an hour to beat.

Amazing! Very touching. Really liked the shadow mechanics. Congrats to the team!

Impressive student-made 3D puzzle-platformer based on Chinese mythology, with very pretty visuals, an overall extremely polished audiovisual presentation, and a simple but well-executed puzzle mechanic involving casting shadows to create new 3D platformers. On the downside, it's [i]extremely[/i] short (it took me less than 20 minutes to complete), with only a handful of puzzles to solve. But given that this is a student-made game developed in a few months and released for free, that sort of brevity tends to come with the territory.