NGAMER #35 – WiiWare Review – LIT

(NB. There are no screenshots for this review as Geraint broke the screen grab machine thingy)

LIT REVIEW
Clever puzzles leave us in the dark…

FORMAT: WiiWARE, DEVELOPER: WAY FORWARD, PRICE:800, OUT: NOW (US), TBC (UK)

WiiWare survival horror eh? Stranded in a school (sounds scary already) with all the lights off, Jake’s dropped into the Lit world with no back story or tutorial. Luckily, it’s easy to pick up. There are 30 rooms to work through, all cloaked in perpetual darkness – darkness you must avoid as if it were a bogey someone has wiped under your school desk. Foolishly step into the shadows and ghostly apparitions will drag you to your doom.

The only way to safely pass through rooms is to use your slingshot (equipped with limited pellets) to smash the windows, letting in beams of natural light that act as corridors to guide you to each exit. Artificial light from TV screens and lamps also helps and intriguing boss fights appear every five rooms or so. All the ingredients for Ring-style fun then, eh?

They should be, but Lit doesn’t feel like a survival horror at all. The only reason it’s being pitched as such is because of its gloomy atmosphere and the fact that some ghosts have stitches on their faces – the clearest indication of evil that there is, obviously.

NIGHT SCHOOL
You control Jake with the nunchuk and aim your weapons with the remote, but there’s plenty of scope for accidental deaths. For example, you’re stood next to a light switch plotting your next move, ready to fire your slingshot. You press A and Jake, due to the curse of proximity, will instead choose to switch off the light switch and plunge himself into darkness. You have to be super-precise which is hard when you’re rushing a level because you’ve done it 20 times already, and keep dying through no fault of your own. Niggles such as these guarantee you’ll repeat levels frequently, but not through choice.

As a puzzler, though, Lit’s actually quite clever. Tasks gradually become more brain-busting. For instance, in one level your only ammo is explosive cherry bombs and you have to shatter a window, yet next to that window is a fragile lamp that you need to light to progress. What do you do?

Solving some of the tougher puzzles gives a real sense of accomplishment, which is the hook Lit needs to hold you until the end. There are a lot of smart ideas here and if they were polished up and put in anything other than a ’survival horror’, they’d surely get the recognition they deserve.

BOXOUT – THE RING-ING
There’s a neat feature in Lit, whereby in some rooms Jake’s girlfriend will phone you from elsewhere in the school. When you pick it up, the game urges you to put the remote to your ear — just like a real phone! Okay, it’s been done before, but it’s vaguely atmospheric here.

NG VERDICT – 3/5
Lit taxes the brain with some well designed puzzles but doesn’t offer any real scares. Still, it’s good fun and something different. Sequel, please!