About halfway through the game there's a portion of a level where a light flashes every few seconds. If you're at all sensitive to this, I advise you to skip this game!

Now onto the actual review...

(This game was a gift from a friend)

Light Fall is a relatively difficult platformer with a twist: you can create your own platforms. It isn't hardcore to the degree that Super Meat Boy is, and the speedrun times are actually very forgiving so even casual players can enjoy.

You play as a a nameless silhouette followed around by the narrator—a cynical owl who helps to unfold the story of Numbra and explain what our wordless hero cannot. Your job is to navigate the four environments (with 13 levels in all) to figure out what has happened to the local people—the Kamloops—and their gods.

Along the way you can also collect memory shards that tell you about the first discovery of Numbra and a little more about the land that you don't see in game.

Light Fall features all of the staples of a contemporary platformer: variable jump height / distance, wall clinging / jumping, the ability to change direction in mid air, and a punishing one-touch death.

You also receive the ability to create your own platforms with the Shadow Core. You can create up to four platforms before you have to touch the ground or a natural platform, and you will need to master this ability in order to find all of the collectables and easter eggs.

Your Shadow Core has a variety of uses. You can summon it directly beneath you for platforming, it can be summoned in the direction you're facing in order to wall jump from it, you can freely place it to block environmental hazards or activate different devices, and you can use it to attack enemies.

The main story has two modes, Normal and Hard, and there are achievements for completing both. Hard mode adds more environmental dangers like spikes and mines and reduces the number of checkpoints per level.

There's also Speedrun mode, which—thankfully—has very relaxed time requirements. There are leaderboards if you want to compete to be the best, but you don't have to be perfect at a level to place.

Light Fall is very stylized. You play entirely in silhouette and it's very cartoony in feel. I personally enjoyed the art, but apparently other players hated it, so be sure to watch a few gameplay videos if you're sensitive to the art style of games.

Otherwise, the four environments are all very unique from each other and level designs are different enough that it doesn't get boring.

The soundtrack is actually pretty good, none of the music felt out of place for the levels you play through.
The narrator sounds professional and delivers his lines naturally and with good emotion.
The sound effects are well timed and fitting. All of them sound like they were custom-made for this game (or at least I didn't recognize any).

A fun game other than one small gripe and one big gripe.

The small gripe
Your Shadow Core attack doesn't shoot out directly in front of you, it's just about at your head level. This makes it absolutely useless against things at ground level. There aren't very many enemies down there, but the ones that are absolutely sucks because you can't hit it until it jumps in the air. And good luck timing that correctly.

The big gripe
The final boss level can go straight to hell. I have never been so frustrated with a platformer than this. Even Normal mode requires absolute precision because you only have maybe 1 second of leeway for any kind of f***ups.

Hard mode makes it even worse by removing the midway checkpoint. I can deal with additional spikes and annoyingly placed mines, BUT WHY WOULD YOU REMOVE THE HALFWAY CHECKPOINT?! It means that you have to do the level perfectly or else you need to start over from the very beginning. This wouldn't even be so bad except for the fact that the "mines" have a field around them that grows and shrinks. They're all synced up to each other (thankfully) but their rhythm isn't synced up to you starting the level. So you can't count on them to be fully expanded or shrunk at the same time through each of your runs. It's random. So, not only do you have to be perfect at your run, you also have to get lucky enough that some of the moving mines aren't directly in your jumping path when you get there.

I... don't know if that makes sense to anyone who hasn't played the game, but hopefully you understand what I'm PO'd about.

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So~
If you can deal with the most infuriating boss level EVER, I do actually recommend this game. The rest of it is really fun and it has some unique mechanics. But buy it on sale, because unless you're going for 100% you won't get 15 hours out of it.
And even if you are going for 100%, you might be better at this game than me and definitely get less than 15 hours out of it >>