Will: Follow the Light review – stunning Unreal Engine 5 visuals can hide the rough edges

In the past generation, narrative-based games like Will: Follow The Light from indie devs often felt technically constrained. Even though Unreal Engine could make incredibly photorealistic environments, the story would usually be confined to a single location, while the complexity of making believable character models meant you were more reliant on discovering the story through notes, audio logs or visions of silhouettes from the past.

In the past, you couldn't really escape the feeling that you were just going through a glorified walking tour. Will: Follow The Light may carry some of that older DNA as an ostensibly intimate family drama that pitches for photoreal intimacy, yet it is also more ambitious in scope than those past PS4-era games, despite some middling execution.

It makes a strong impression, opening at media resolution as your protagonist, Will, is seemingly lost at sea, trying to weather the storm as his boat seems likely to succumb to the harsh waves at any moment, before the game takes us back to where it all started. Will is a lighthouse keeper, his shift in particular being on a remote island in the north, away from his family. As you tend to your chores, reporting on precipitation levels and communicating with a colleague over the radio, it has that mundane familiarity of one of those last-gen narrative adventures I've played before.

Yet just as you think it's time to hit the sack, you receive an emergency that takes you back to the mainland, where you're not just being told but walking through the wreckage of your hometown, hit by a mudslide, structures still collapsing as you try to make your way back to your home to find that your son has gone missing.

The lonely sea

While Will's journey to find his son involves braving the northern seas largely alone, this earlier chapter feels like a statement from indie developer TomorrowHead Studio: 'we too can create the same living, breathing worlds as AAA'. I'm reminded of Still Wakes The Deep, itself also about a disaster set in the North Sea, where the story also involved other characters in front of you, which felt like a technical leap for studio The Chinese Room.

The difference between that game and Will: Follow The Light is the polish and execution. While I commend your commitment to walking around the town and talking to survivors as you try to get your boat, Molly is prepared to head out to sea. It's also clear from the uncanny faces, animations, and dispassionate voice acting that it's not quite up to snuff and is a distraction. Ironically, it's a comfort when the narrative in later sections falls back on the tried-and-true tricks of environmental storytelling and audio logs, while visions of past events are filtered dreamlike, making you overlook the NPCs' uncanniness.

So it is then that Will: Follow The Light is at its strongest when you wave goodbye to civilisation for the northern sea and wilderness with just yourself, Molly, and usually a piping hot brew of tea in the cabin. From other lighthouses to another isolated town covered in fog, to snowy environments that you'll have to navigate by dog-sledging, the game covers a decent variety of ground across its 6-8 hour playtime.

Lighting up an Unreal world

What arguably elevates these cold, harsh but beautiful landscapes is the incredible use of Unreal Engine 5's lighting, be it the flash of lightning that just about illuminates rainfall in the dark night sky or a lamp that thinly cuts through thick fog.

The lamp that Will carries also has several other functions as you add more features to it, such as different colour filters that help illuminate mysterious symbols, which trigger some of the aforementioned visions, or even melt thin layers of ice that have frozen doors shut. It annoyingly runs out of power quickly, so you have to find a charging point and play a minigame matching frequencies to charge the lamp.

Many other puzzle interactions have a similar intricacy of inputs that mean you're not just pushing a button or QTE, which adds a layer of realistic immersiveness, such as manually adjusting the front and back sails of your boat, or turning on the motor to control it without wind, the latter advised for navigating tighter spaces.

For a game about following the light, I felt it could also have done with a bit more direction. It's refreshing to see a game not immediately resorting to obvious signposting like yellow paint, but earlier chapters did have me puzzled for what was surely longer than intended when you're being told to go somewhere or find an object, but not having a clue what it is in your mind's eye, even when it might be staring you in the face. Worse still were the times I thought it was better to restart, only to find that there was no recent checkpoint and I'd have to redo a dull stretch of an earlier area.

At the very least, these frustrations become less frequent towards the latter half, despite several more convoluted puzzles popping up to keep you from your destination right there in the distance.

The story's mysteries of intergenerational and emotional trauma may not have landed for me by the end, but when you're out there in the north gazing up at the aurora's light, or coming out of the end of a storm to emerge into the tranquillity of day, I couldn't really say that the journey wasn't worthwhile.