When it comes to first-person adventure puzzlers, I feel a compulsion to play them, but it depends on one particular thing. Lateral thinking is not a strong component in my wheelhouse, despite my deep love of puzzles, so for me it’s the setting that truly cements my desire to play. Firewatch, for example, is set deep in the Wyoming wilderness. What Remains of Edith Finch on a remote island off of Washington State. For WILL: Follow The Light, you play as Will, a lighthouse keeper torn between islands in the tumultuous seas of the ‘North’. But I was thoroughly mistaken when I thought that I’d be staying firmly on land, tending to my lighthouse and tinkering with brain teasers. Will: Follow The Light wants you to also sail across seemingly endless seas.
I went to a sailing lesson at university once. I’m not sure what compelled me, given the only time I’d been on a boat up to this point was a not-so-relaxing holiday on the Norfolk Broads with my dad. I arrived, eager and upsettingly naive, to a lake in Poole with zero nautical experience. I was told it was a beginner lesson where I’d learn the fundamentals. Only it wasn’t and my friend and I were left alone in the murky waters of Dorset’s coast to fend for ourselves. Luckily, despite my severe lack of boat hours, my friend had a weird abundance of them and basically kept me alive and out of the water. It certainly didn’t spark a love of boats. A holiday on a cruise ship, once. A catamaran in Santorini, lovely. But I wasn’t the captain. Only, in WILL: Follow The Light, I now am.
I should’ve suspected that my journey would be heavily nautical though. The game’s opening scenes saw me battered around on a boat in the middle of a storm. It’s the kind of thing I have literal nightmares about, big waves bashing into the side of me, the threat of a tsunami washing everything I love away. But then, I’m abruptly awoken to a storm threatening my lighthouse and the island I’m situated on. This is TomorrowHead Studio’s first-ever game and it kicks off with a bang. Or perhaps a thunderous surge would be better suited.
Alone at the lighthouse, I’m prompted to return to the mainland to witness a devastating natural disaster and no sign of my son, or Dad, who’s seemingly aloof most of the time. This prompts a desperate and game-stretching search for my missing offspring, Thomas, and there’s a lot of sailing to do if I want to uncover the mystery that will hopefully lead me back to a missing piece of my heart.
Sailing isn’t complex, but you do have to pay attention. And there was certainly a part around halfway through the game where a skill issue, or perhaps an update I hadn’t yet downloaded, was something I had to navigate to get any further in the game. I was in deep fog, feeling claustrophobic as I directed my boat through treacherous waters, and that’s when the adventure really kicked in. In WILL: Follow The Light, you traverse a lot of different terrain in a short space of time, which truly felt like I was making a journey.
The developer wants you to play in a dark room with good headphones and I was only too happy to oblige. Only, in the opening hour or so, I grew deeply concerned that I’d agreed to play a horror game. The glass of a lighthouse window shatters in the deep stormy dark, making me jump out of my skin. A shadowy tree whips around in the wind that I quickly mistake for a Slenderman-type figure. At one point, I was convincing myself that the font was akin to Salad Fingers.
Then, I realised I was getting into my own head, a symptom of loneliness, and I was so alone. But as I let myself lean into it, I felt like this was in fact exactly what the developers wanted me to feel. I let the sounds of their work wash over me as an orchestral ethereality swam through my headphones and then it all became a little less scary and a little more immersive.
And when the loneliness was really starting to get to me, I heard a voice. A dispatcher called Cass contacted me over the radio, and from there on out, I was thrown into a web of people who have seemingly known me for a long time. It turns out, in fact, that I have a deep-seated history not only with the North, but with every part of what I do in this game. Sailing, lighthouse keeping, fatherhood, they’re all connected in a much deeper way than I could’ve ever imagined.
I was almost immediately solving puzzles, but like any good walking simulator, they’re cradled into the adventure. As I fix broken switches and gather important statistics, the narrative uncoils itself from the box it has been waiting to get out of. I need to find my son, but I can’t do that whilst sitting at a lighthouse. But, when TomorrowHead Studios called this WILL: Follow The Light, they really meant it. It is light that dictates everything you do in this game, from eerie dreamscapes depicting glowing apparitions to using a lantern to unravel mysterious drawings on the walls of buildings.
As a first-person game, I was guided by Will’s voice, which reminded me of Karl Theobald of Green Wing and Plebs fame. It’s this voice that travels through the narrative, whether in conversation with the few figures you meet or in musings to yourself, more often than not these inserts were hints at puzzles to come. You really have to listen though because it’s a blink and you’ll miss it situation. Once a conversation or contemplation is over, if you haven’t picked up a hint that’s been dropped for you, you’ll be hard pushed to recall it.
The puzzles come thick and fast. Standard puzzle concepts are hidden within the workings of a lighthouse or the fixings of a boat. At one point, I’m reassembling a winch and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing apart from, somehow, I just am doing it. There are constant hints on the top right of the screen that tell me some basics of what I’m trying to do that I’m more than welcome to hide. I can use my journal with my innate scribblings that tell me of things I’ve seen or information I’ve accrued.
I’m also prompted to search the environment. I wouldn’t be on much of an adventure if I stuck strictly to the storyline, would I? But, it’s still fairly linear. You can’t stray too far from the main path, though you can pick up the odd carved boat for your collection or a piece of a solar system model. There’s tapes, too, that play out on a recorder you have in your pocket for such an occasion. Voices that left me feeling, somehow, even more alone.
Your adventure is also fairly streamlined. You can only interact with items that have a little white dot above them, so quick sweeps of the surroundings are easily done. The same can’t be said for NPC interaction though as I bashed into solid figures that had nothing to say to me numerous times. I’m nothing if not thorough, but the white dots did feel like they dissuaded me from doing more. Some parts of your exploration are narrative-building, some are integral to the objective, but it quickly becomes clear which are which.
And it’s in this narrative that you begin to learn about Will. Like any good first-person adventure, when there’s no fast-paced action to distract you, there’s a keen focus on what you’re being told and how that makes you feel. In WILL: Follow The Light, there’s an emotional tale that utterly surprised me. You’re looking for your son, your dad is with him, but you have a strange relationship with both.
While you explore this narrative and solve the puzzles, the developers say, “One of the most important fundamental parts of WILL: Follow The Light for us has always been the music. It’s not just a layer, it’s part of how the in-game world is felt.” And the orchestral arrangement truly does ebb and flow at the right moments. At one point, I was feeling lost in a snowy terrain heading for a tower of light with hopes of furthering my journey and the epic strings crescendoed in. As a violinist myself, it spoke to me on a level deeper than I expected. And the game slows down for these moments, too.
Ultimately, you’ll fulfil your objectives regardless, even if some most definitely feel harder than others. But each objective will take you further on this intriguing story that prompted me to keep going. The sign of a good first-person puzzle is an incentive to finish and at no point did I ever feel like I didn’t want to get to the end. If anything, when the end did come, I felt I could’ve played for longer.
