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Atmospheric browser-based adventure of rune magic and icy plains., February 4, 2012A Colder Light is set on plains of winter ice under a sky filled with significantly named stars. This world could be an alternate North Pole, or perhaps just the North Pole of another past time, but the game is described as fantasy and the geography is not specified. This is an atmospheric adventure with a very satisfying design, a good puzzle system, an attractive web browser presentation and a haunting feel.
The setup is that you live out in this frozen wilderness with your father, who has been teaching you survival skills and respect for the power of nature. One day he does not come home, and you must draw on your ingenuity and on the spiritual magic of stars and runestones to find out what has happened to him. Determining how and when to call the game's various spirit entities is the primary ongoing puzzle.
A Colder Light is driven by a combination of keyword hyperlinks in the prose and mini-menus of useful actions which pop up at the bottom of the screen, a combination well-suited to this game. The roster of locations is small, though dense with spirit puzzle action, and your runes need to be tested out in permutations, something I imagine could be a bit of a chore to carry out via typing. It's also impossible to waste time trying actions that have no bearing on the proceedings as they simply aren't available in the first place.
The game is designed in such a way that you still have to make some logical imaginative leaps yourself (which to me is the key attraction of parser driven games) based on your observations of which stars are visible in different locations and your ideas about which runes might do what. There is also a sense of bleak urgency which seeps through the modest but poetic-leaning prose of the narrator, and the strength and resolve of the character you're playing come through clearly in that voice.
The aesthetic design of the game screen sets the mood perfectly, with a semitransparent text window floating before a far view of the cold and dark horizon. There are, however, a couple of shortcomings in the delivery system. The first is the slowness of the hybrid Inform 7 / Quixe / hyperlinks game engine; it can take between 1/4 second to 1 second to process each action. This adds up over time and is especially felt on a repeat play. The second shortcoming is mostly a problem because of the first: there is no save capability. While the game can be considered short by most standards, and not too hard, the time it takes to play is longer than such assessments would suggest. So for now, if you want to take a break, it's important not to close the game window. Breaking off completely will necessitate a restart next time.
While the game engine may be an iteration of a work in progress, the game itself is definitely no experiment – A Colder Light is a very fine, compactly designed and enjoyable adventure whose contents play to this new delivery format while also bringing across some of the particular strengths of parser based games.