There’s no shortage of moody puzzle platformer games, with trend-setters like Limbo and Inside sitting next to Little Nightmares and Unravel, which offer slower, more thought-provoking platform action than Mario’s typical fare and Donkey Kong. Enter Vesper: Zero Light Edition, another atmospheric adventure that carries its inspiration up its sleeve and hopes to make its mark in the crowded space.
You play as an android named Seven lost on a largely desolate planet with remnants of an ancient civilization that has long since suffered its downfall. It is up to you to explore these lands and find out the truth about what happened here. It’s a simple plot, told mostly through scattered message logs hidden in hard-to-reach places, and any background story you might gather from environmental design. I didn’t stray too far from the story or feel affected by the ending, which is clearly meant to be something bigger than what its accumulation guarantees, but in terms of creating an atmosphere for exploring moment by moment, it serves. its purpose.
This general atmosphere is based on visual and audio design, which is arguably the game’s greatest strength. The foreground uses a silhouette art style that is strongly reminiscent of Limbo, with few details outside of the bold black shapes, but this contrasts sharply with surprisingly colorful views that create stunning views despite their simplicity. Each of the main levels uses a different color scheme, with the bold colors that really appear on the OLED Switch screen if you’re lucky enough to have one. Beyond the palette, the level design is basic, but often features some magnificent background elements, such as giant mechs or monolithic statues, with the camera panning at certain times to sell the grandeur of the landscape.
Your adventure through these barren wastelands is a challenge, with the Set completely helpless when its adventure begins. As you progress through the linear levels, you will encounter aggressive robotic enemies roaming the world. Your only defense, to begin with, is to hide among the bushes, so that they will not find you, chase you, and end your existence in one fell swoop.
You will soon discover a Drive Gun, a handy device capable of capturing light sources and transferring them to another location. Using the right stick gives you complete control of your aim, with one trigger absorbing light and the other spitting it back into place. It is a tool that has multiple purposes. The simplest of these is to simply unlock a door that requires a light source on a nearby pedestal, but it can also be used to block the path of a ubiquitous dangerous dark substance in the back half of the game, and can be used to Possess enemies to activate specific switches or to borrow your attack skills to eliminate other bots in your path.
It’s a small set of tools, but developers make smart use of it in the few hours it takes to see the credits. Eventually, you’ll gain the ability to contain two, and then three, light sources at once, which opens up some extra complexity for complex puzzles and challenging scenarios that involve juggling multiple enemies as you try to reach the other end unscathed. .
Everything sounds good on paper, but the overall execution leaves something to be desired. The character’s movement is slow, with a strange “change” of position as you move from one screen to another that never feels right. Some platform gaps are as wide as the maximum of your jump, which means that the smallest misstep can mean a long walk to try again or a premature death through a hole or at the hands of an enemy.
This is not too punishing in most cases, but there were more than a few occasions when the amount of ground I needed to re-tread became exhausting and the loading times, while not horrible, can be long enough to make death frustrating. appearance. Similarly, there are some scenarios where the solution of a puzzle may be dark enough to be reduced to trial and error, and when coupled with a control point that seems a little too far back, it can suppose a tedious time.
Nor does it help that from time to time the “catch and release” functions of the trigger gun do not seem to work as they are supposed to work, with your beam sometimes absorbing light but never finishing the task. , and the same to spit it out again to try to possess enemies. Deaths after these situations feel especially cheap and unfair.
There are enough of these situations to be annoying, but they don’t completely break the experience. Throughout the trip, there is fun and additional elements are introduced often enough to keep the experience fresh during the runtime. Juggling multiple light sources, light barriers, motion detection traps, multiple enemies, and teleportation platforms at once can be a handful, but most of the time it’s balanced so the reward is worth it. effort. .
The satisfaction of clearing a complicated section by finding the solution after the initial feeling of helplessness is an essential part of any puzzle game, and Vesper offers it little by little, even if there is some frustration along the way. . If you’re into an expansive landscape to explore, you won’t find it here, but this is a journey through an intriguing and often stunning world that slowly settles into a groove to deliver a satisfying puzzle platforming experience. It’s not without its flaws, but it does it well enough to take a look.
Rating: 3/5