Have you ever seen a game in the store front and thought to yourself, this may be exactly what I need to get in to a game. Only to find out that it was the exact opposite? Well that is what happened to me with S.O.L: Search of Light. But first let me explain a little further.
Dark, Fantastical, …Narrative?
This game bills itself as “a steampunk dark fantasy setting adventure and the combination of resource management and narrative mechanics that we define as adventure management.” To me, that sounds great. The only thing that really was missing here was the narrative portion of the game. At least for me. Don’t get me wrong; the game does show story text. However, after the initial tutorial you go through, there isn’t much to it. They are nonsensical at best and don’t really further a narrative for what you are doing and why you should keep doing it.
For instance, when you finally hand over the 3 robot souls to the vendor in one of the depths, he might respond to you with a text that reads “Down here, the sun is a chimera. Have you ever seen it?” Or you might run across this gem, “I swallowed a watch yesterday and now the hours are chiming. Do you need more time?” Neither one of those make any sense to me and, in context of the game, it still doesn’t.
Personally this makes the “wanting” to play difficult, especially in a resource management game. I found myself repeating cycle after cycle of the depth of the black hole but ultimately found myself wondering what for. I guess you could blame that part on me, by having an expectation of what was to come from these “narrative events” but I struggle with this reasoning because every where this game is listed, it bills itself as a game that will stand on the wishlist of “narrative-loving players”. To me, this is a testament to a game that is rich in story telling. I found none of this in my many playthroughs.
Style Points
The graphics of S.O.L are initially what drew me to the game in the first place. They are exactly what I was looking for when perusing the new game and upcoming releases. What drew me in was the vibe it gave me. For some reason, I just saw “Nightmare Before Christmas” type of graphics and had to take a deeper look. I read more about it and was almost sold entirely. I did want to learn more about the resource management and was it going to be a difficult chore or a fun experience? I needed to know.
The graphics definitely were exactly as promised, they gave a steampunk vibe and throughout the different levels or “depths” they remained. There were a few instances where the textures in the game glitched out or would block you from moving entirely, but admittedly those were far and few between. But still, they will cause you to break immersion from the game and have to find a way to deal with them or just accept them, if you can, and continue on.
Loops, Robots and Resources
The gameplay loop of S.O.L, “leaves something to be desired” is how I would describe it. You play as “the Foreigner” and you find yourself in an abandoned village. You are given what appears as water droplets as one of your resources and ultimately your life line. As you progress you can use this resource to build walls, towers, give to robots in the depths, and to give robots different jobs like warrior, blacksmith, constructor, etc. As you go across these worlds in the depths of the black hole, you will find robots just lying around and seemingly lost without you. Just drop a “water drop” down and the robot will come by and pick it up with a note saying “see you in town”. You might find one robot in a depth or you might find 4 or 5. It all just depends. There can be what feels like an endless amount of these robots working for your village.
This is also where your “management” comes in to play. Will you need several Warrior Bots, Construction Bots, Blacksmith Bots or an even number of each> I found that no matter if you had one Constructor Bot or 5, the upgrades and builds would get done in the same amount of time. The part that sped up was being able to build or upgrade a tower and a wall at the same time.
As you progress and go further in the depths of the black holes, you will find that the gameplay seems to get more fun. You will be able to add more skills such as double jump (which is invaluable), a charged hit, the ability to push objects and more. The more robots you have working for you, the more this will allow you to add “advantages” or more jobs for the robots to help you with.
Performance Issues
The glitches were what really killed S.O.L for me. There were a few that I could understand or overlook, such as going to upgrade a tower and it becoming one giant red or pink pixel. Sure, I could overlook this because the functionality of the tower still worked. The others weren’t so easily overlooked. There was one where I selected a level in the black hole and all that happened was a black screen. I could see the light on my back in the form of a small dot on the screen that reacted with my pressing on the controller. This required me to pause the game and leave that depth. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem but when you go back to the black hole, that level you were on… well, it’s just fully done now. So if it happened to be a good level, like a treasure chest one or a robot level, you just lost out on that and better luck next time.
There were several times my character, while completing puzzles in the game, would simply start shaking very quickly and after pressing the checkmark to signal you’ve figured the puzzle out. I would just drop through the floor and keep falling. I was forced several times to press the options button and to leave that depth, causing you to lose access to that level and more importantly, all the progress you’ve made within that depth. This increasingly became more and more frustrating the more I ran upon this.
The one glitch, however, that I simply could not for the life of me understand was the glitch where all of my robots stopped doing anything for me. They stopped even appearing on my screen from time to time and, when they were back on my screen, they just ignored everything. I upgraded a new wall and all my constructor bots just kept rolling by the construction and doing nothing. This happened with every single upgrade or build I tried to complete. This frustrated me more than every other glitch because even when I went to new depths and recruited new robots, I would come back to my village and the new robots were nowhere to be found. I would search for them, even drop them some resources, but to no avail. This ultimately is where I shut the game down and didn’t turn it back on.
Conclusion
S.O.L: Search of Light is definitely a beautiful game that simply just doesn’t live up to the self description it has been given. It would have definitely helped to have spent more time in the oven which I think would have done this game wonders. A story for this game would have allowed the player to feel and root for “the Foreigner”, if we simply just had a idea of what we were doing and why we were doing it. The glitches where also another part of the game that really hurt the reception for me. It’s really hard for me to recommend a game with bugs and glitches like this but I could possibly see myself doing so had the game been hitting on all cylinders. It simply wasn’t.
S.O.L.: Search of Light was played on a PlayStation 5 and I was provided a code by Firenut Games. It was developed by Trigger the Monster and released on PS4/5 (these are not stackable as they are sold separately), Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. Check out the trailer below
