Release Date: May 11th, 2015
Developer / Publisher: RAC7 Games
Format: PC Game
First playthrough time: 7 hours

Clapping reveals your surroundings

Major Pros:

• Excellent minimalist art style with a great use of colors
• Good sound effects set mood and keep the player on edge (but aren’t necessary for the game if they creep you out!)

Minor Pros:

• The second half of the game, the light world, lets the player replay the same level layouts with new traps, solutions, and more (and faster) monsters
• Excellent level design allows players to learn what to do on their own without explanation and level names give hints

Monsters follow sound

Major Cons:

• Angles to aim your character at in order to effectively throw rocks are limited to the 8 points of a compass

Minor Cons:

• Will leave you terrified of orb shaped patterns of red lines which other people will not understand
• You will also learn to hate water
• I think I “fell” out of a level once or twice due to a moving block glitching me through a wall

Sound lights up and echos in the exit zone

I’m a sucker for a good art style and minimalist art styles like the one in Dark Echo with their high contrast and bright colors really appeal to me. Combine that with a unique puzzle experience that gives my mental visualization abilities a stretch and cheap price tag and I snagged this thing the day it came out. The following 7 hours of gameplay left my heart beating a little faster as I snuck, tricked, and bolted my way for the exit. I found all the levels to be interesting and fun except that one level at the end with too many moving parts where I died a lot and if you’ve played you know what I’m talking about. My biggest complaint about the game was just that your character is limited to only facing 8 different directions which makes creating effective distractions at the right place a little difficult sometimes. Given the simplicity of the controls however, the 8 direction limit seems appropriate. Overall I loved the game and hope to see many more like it in the future.

Ascent to the Light World

Find this game at the publisher’s website or on Steam.