Kingfishers! Skeletons! Orbs!
Another way of describing Light No Fire is that it’s No Man’s Sky held up to an enchanted mirror. It’s immediately recognisable as a sibling production, from its gemlike logo art to the acoustics of the title, but all the familiar elements have been inverted. No Man’s Sky’s art direction is designed to evoke a classic Frank Herbert sci-fi book cover; Light No Fire takes that vivid palette and applies it to a fairytale world that recalls Narnia and Pan’s Labyrinth. Where No Man’s Sky gives you billions of planets, Light No Fire devotes all its attention to one. And where No Man’s Sky aims for the feeling of being alone in the universe, despite its latter-day multiplayer elements, Light No Fire is about community. You can play it alone, chopping down trees and lugging them up a mountain to construct a cabin retreat, but the developers are trying to encourage players to explore, build and survive together.
The game’s procedurally generated map is designed to feel more plausible and crafted than No Man Sky’s planets, with more realistic continents, oceans, valleys and rivers. In particular, Hello Games want to create some genuinely mountain-sized mountains - taller than Everest, in fact - rather than the glorified foothills you find in many games. You’ll be able to explore these landscapes on foot, which sounds like it’ll take forever, or avail yourself of vehicles such as sailing rafts, and mounts that include giant birds. The birds are very much my highlight so far. They include what appears to be a supersized Eurasian kingfisher, a beautiful blue-and-orange riverside bird I loved as a kid.
We see players swooping about on draconic creatures, and others plying the waves beneath in their rafts. We see beacons of the kind that summoned the Rohan to Gondor. And we see faerie touches that aren’t worlds away from Zelda: people with rabbit heads or antlers; moons floating down valleys, low enough to scrape the foliage; metal colossi slumbering in the swamps; dreamy temple interiors where ogres lounge among drapes; and a giant orb on a hilltop with a mazy, fissured surface.
Captured entirely in-game, it communicates much more about how Light No Fire plays than the first No Man’s Sky trailer, but plenty remains mysterious - and as a fan of the more occult kind of videogame fantasy, I’m enjoying the mystery. What do you think? One last thing: Hello Games are adamant that this isn’t the end for No Man’s Sky. The space sim will receive more updates next year.
