Become a Member
Join Now!Set in the far north, you are a lighthouse keeper, but a disaster closer to home refocuses your priorities. As you set about to find your family, you’ll face stormy seas, explore lonely islands and maybe find some peace along the way. Wrap up warm, and hug those closest to you tight for our WILL: Follow the Light Review.
A Lonely Life
I imagine the life of a lighthouse keeper to be a pretty lonely one. Playing as our protagonist, a man named Will, we begin our journey doing various ‘lighthouse’ related tasks – adjusting weather equipment, taking readings, fixing a generator, making sure the big light to stop ships crashing is all working as it should be and so on.
It feels like an extremely personal game from the team at Tomorrowhead that tackles some heavy topics, like loss, loneliness and forgiveness. Created by a small team, they’ve likely turned a few heads with some great use of Unreal Engine 5 that really pushes the games visuals in certain areas.
Tomorrowhead definitely aim high – there’s some eye-catching gameplay mechanics like sailing in a small yacht and dog sledding through snowy mountains, and if you’ve seen any of that in trailers, it’s certainly enticing. However, for those unaware, WILL: Follow the Light is a primarily narratively focused ‘walking simulator’, which is a bit of a derogatory term, if you ask me, but there we are. Most of you time will be sent walking (or with a hold of a trigger) jogging, solving puzzles and pushing the story forward.
Disjointed
Alas, as someone who really does enjoy a good yarn, following a relatively solid introduction, the game starts to really fall apart for me in terms of both gameplay, and – perhaps more worryingly for a narratively focused title – making the story actually engaging.
Following your learning-how-to-lighthouse introduction, your mate Greg rocks up and tells you here’s here to takeover and that you need to go home quickly. Why? He won’t say, but we soon learn that your hometown has been flattened by a mudslide, and your son Thomas is missing, and that he was last seen with your estranged father.
This feels like it should be a pretty big deal – people are dead, homes are destroyed! – but the reaction of the many folks you’ll meet in the town as you try to discern what’s actually happened seems to be one of mild indifference, even as they’re racking up the dead on a chart in the police station.
This is an Emergency…isn’t it?
The failures to convey the urgency of many moments in WILL: Follow the Light really drag the game down, and in my opinion, stem from two areas – animation and voice acting. While the game looks pretty, this is very much a small team punching above their weight, and graphics can only go so far.
Character models are often ugly, and merely stand around on one spot, like they’re on pause, just waiting for you to interact with them. Worse, virtually all the voice acting can be frustratingly poor – even Will, our main character seems merely bored, and does not successfully convey the emotions of a man in a desperate search for his son.
You eventually learn that your father has taken your son on his boat, and so you set about fixing up ‘Molly’, your own small yacht to take after them. Again, this all seems very urgent, but the deckhands at the dock seem perfectly at ease to let you do all the heavy lifting, repairing switches, sorting our power outages and finding parts on your own.
Now, there’s a larger plot element at play here that I won’t spoil, but I will say that overall, the narrative did not land for me at all, which is a big shame of an adventure where the story is primarily the focus.
Setting Sail
Gameplay wise, there’s also frustratingly little to get excited about. A fair amount of excitement and noise was made about the game’s ‘realistic sailing’ mechanics, but unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up in practice.
Yes, you can raise, lower and adjust the sails, turn the engine on or off, and it all looks very nice at times, particularly in stormy weather, but often its just moving forward for unspecified periods of time against featureless open sea or far away landmasses.
They mix it up every now and then – there’s a fog-based traversal puzzle that sees you navigating in low visibility. There’s also a late game sequence where you need to avoid an angry whale and the occasional iceberg. Eventually, you deploy a device to drive the whale off so you can get to your final destination. Despite these attempts to offer some variety, it’s not particularly engaging.
So much so the developers even let you skip sailing entirely, and occasionally, make a cup of tea instead. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Walking, Exploring, Fixing…
The rest of the gameplay is naturally made up of first person exploration and puzzles, through some nice looking environments. With regards to the puzzles, they’re all fairly rudimentary, but occasionally suffer a severe lack of signposting in terms of what a player is meant to be aiming for.
At one point, I had found some gears, but was missing what looked like a winch to lift up the mechanism. I looked everywhere, and even reached out to the PR team to check what I was meant to be doing. Surprise, there was no winch, I just had to randomly mess around with the gears to find a combination that worked. Other ‘puzzles’ are merely irritating – like putting together a device made up of 20 or so pieces, with a vague manual. Playing on controller, expect to get annoyed as you trial and error what goes where.
Outside of that, you’ll be moving boxes, figuring out lock code combinations, and searching for collectibles hidden around the different environments, be it marble-sized ‘planets’ in small boxes or a variety of nice model ships. One highlight was sledding with dogs through a snowy region, but alas, it was over in less than 15 minutes, which was a real shame. It felt fun to control though!
Early in the game you’re given a lamp, which once repaired casts different types of light, be it normal, red or blue. This bulky device runs on a irritatingly low-capacity battery that will need to be recharged often at charging stations. The light is used for different puzzles, in addition to being important narratively for reasons I won’t spoil.
Speaking of narrative, one you’ve the light in hand, you’ll also start to discover ‘memory-echoes’ that you can activate with the lantern. These are usually represented by a scratched drawing in either red or blue, and you can focus the light on the drawing to get the echo to play. They often provide a clue as to what to do to progress, so it’s worth paying attention to the environment as you explore.
Time to go Home
You can tell there’s a lot of passion and talent behind what the team at Tomorrowhead have put together, and I’m genuinely gutted the game didn’t quite live up to my expectations, I hate writing a review like this – it’s no fun at all.
While WILL: Follow the Light can very much look the part, it simply didn’t hold up for me when it came to the actual gameplay and narrative. The story felt fragmented and poorly delivered, even though a late game twist and a heartfelt message about the time we have and the choices we make felt genuine.
While narrative ‘walking-sim’ fans may find some enjoyment and a few bright ideas, it’s not quite enough to make this sailing trip truly worth the journey.
Review Code provided by the developer for this review.
WILL: Follow the Light
Played on
PC
PROS
- Can look very pretty at times
- Passionate, heartfelt message
CONS
- A disjointed, fragmented story
- Poor voice acting
- Poor player signposting
