Critique de Light Up The Town (PC)

Light Up The Town apporte le exacte type of festive cheer that I need and crave to help remediate that post-November blues. With a simple concept, a spool of warm lights, and a quaint town of winter wonders and candlelit biomes, it delivers a beautifully hand-crafted experience that rejects strenuous work and squeezes the throttle of a minimalist palette of seasonal delicacies and ambient vistas. It doesn’t tell much of a story, nor does it spend all that long bulking out an episodic plot with pointless fodder to keep you flicking through. No, it settles for an easy task, a small homestead, and a tool that allows you to smother just a glimmer of Christmas spirit into its wintry core.

Au cas où vous ne l'auriez pas encore deviné, Light Up The Town is all about spreading joy to a sleepy hollow of a town with whatever sparkling lights you have in your back pocket. Think Génie du béton, but with less magical graffiti and fewer bone-idled bullies, and you should have a vague understanding of what it is that we’re talking about here. That is, at least for the most part, what this cutesy indie excursion is all about: bringing the razzle and dazzle of festive cheer to the world.

There’s a straightforward hook here that doesn’t require too much effort to understand. For the sake of fleshing out the context, though, it goes like this: a young ferret with a keen eye for majestic scenery embarks on a noble quest to decorate a small town with lights, seasonal patterns, and an abundance of enchanting set pieces that simply suinter spirit and communal warmth. That, in short, is where you begin your journey — at the foot of a borough that craves a hint of festive joy. Again, it’s a simple setup, but boy is it wholesome.

A World With Color

Light Up The Town pays homage to the blissful joys of Christmas in a way that passionately reflects warmth and childhood memories, snowy nights and radiant lights. It’s a bit like a Pixar flick, only it doesn’t foster a powerful moral compass, but a simple yet elegant reminder that couleur holds the power to reimagine a world of idyllic qualities. A cute ferret; a snowy town; and an infinite string of baubles and lights. The rest, frankly, is a picture unto itself—a beaming canvas of seasonal wonders and chalky whites, eighties pulp and mesmerizing textures of nostalgically familiar wisps of red and gold, green and blue.

Herein lies Light Up The Town’s powerful ingredient: a tool that allows you to explore a town devoid of color and whimsy, and to create and flourish its boroughs with an endless variety of blinking lights and bulbs. That, in short, is all that the game is: traversing the inner biomes of a world, and adding an enchanting glamor to its crags and crevices. There are no goals to accomplish, nor are there any strict time limits to prevent you from unleashing your inner creative. It’s just you, a satchel of lights that you can customize, rotate and resize, and a vast winter wonderland that beckons for a festive overhaul.

While the idea here is incredibly simple, by no means is it lackluster or devoid of warming palpitations. See, the game has a tendency to keep you second guessing your next piece of environmental artwork, which in turn leads you on a drawn-out endeavor that often involves experimenting with vast quantities of lights and snowy synergies, sizes and color schemes. Again, the objective is as black and white as the snow and coal that consumes the canvas. But it’s the way in which it coneys its composition; it essentially removes the borders in the hopes that you’ll wind up spending a lot longer coursing through the motions than necessary. And honestly, you probably will.

Marcher dans un pays des merveilles d'hiver

Light Up The Town is a game that you could quite easily soak up for a handful of hours and still feel the need to add a few final touches to once the final bulb has been screwed in. See, that’s the thing with these sorts of creative quests — you don’t need an endless supply of side missions or randomly generated jobs to get lost in the process. Here, you could quite possibly fall into the loop of venturing back and forth between areas and finding fresh ways to adjust small pieces. And with a tool belt that’s also incredibly easy to use and navigate, you could, in all fairness, spend hours just gazing at your work whilst looking for another blank spot on the canvas to fill. Coupable.

Given that there is a worrying lack of Christmas-themed games on the market, Light Up The Town comes as a genuine feast for the senses. Add the fact that it also isn’t plagued with tons of technical bugs or a concerning lack of fine tuning and polish, and you have quite the stocking filler on your hands, truly.

Thankfully, there’s enough of a blank slate here to keep you illuminating its corners for hours. Could it do with more space? Maybe, but I’m not about to complain about its lack of a festive spirit or heartbeat, because frankly, what it brings to its small scale is a lot more screen-worthy than your average Génie du béton doppelgänger. It’s just a darn shame that it didn’t pop up from out of the snow earlier. At least it fills in for Le Grinch : Aventures de Noël» shortcomings, though. Swings and roundabouts, you know how it is.

Verdict

If Le Grinch : Aventures de Noël wasn’t enough to put you in the festive spirit, then perhaps there’ll be a little more for you to enjoy in Light Up The Town. Granted, it’s an entirely different snowball, but given that Christmassy escapades are disappointingly scarce, it seems only fitting that we saddle the two together in the same sled, so to speak. Either way, if it is a wholesome seasonal exploit that you’re itching to carve out from the rather petite iceberg of Christmas-centric video games, then you should definitely consider throwing your pennies into this icy cavern of joyful tidings. A bold suggestion, but one that, to be perfectly honest with you, feels droite.