Developer: MadLight
Publisher: Leonardo Interactive
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Seed of Life – Review
Seed of Life, an action-adventure puzzle game by developer MadLight, is full of wonders but also full of struggles. The game just came out this Summer and it sparked both good and bad reviews. In our opinion, the game has great potential, but it lacked in a lot of aspects. Like the deteriorating planet in Seed of Life, the game itself also needs saving. Are both of them a lost cause?
Story
The game kicks off with a beautiful cutscene where we get our first glimpse of Lumia, the dying planet where Cora, the protagonist of the story, lives with her grandpa. During this cutscene, she tells us how Lumia has been dying since she was a little baby and that the planet also has been invaded and overtaken by aliens called Namurians. The only chance to save the world is finding and activating The Seed. Only The Seed can bring back life and restore nature to what it once was. Knowing all this, Cora sets her path towards The Seed.
At first glance, this seems like an impressive game with an interesting concept. Heck, it’s actually a very intriguing concept! Unfortunately, the execution of telling this story was a big letdown. Firstly, the voice-acting was quite unpleasant to listen to. Cora’s voice sounds like that of a little schoolgirl who’s doing her first presentation in front of the class, reading the text right off her cheat sheet. It felt forced, awkward, and boring. Secondly, the story-telling is all over the place and not thoroughly worked out. It has many plotholes and it’s inconsistent like it was made up along our journey just to convince us that the game has more to offer than meets the eye. Unfortunately, this deception backfires. The story content that we do get in the game, however, is so dependent on Cora’s blatant hand-holding narration that it takes the depth out of the plot.
Graphics
Seed of Life is a 3D action-adventure game with beautiful details and colors, making it easy for us to enjoy the scenery during our explorations in the semi-open world. The game succeeds in immersing us in the deteriorating alien planet through a mix of soft tones and bright luminescent elements. The graphics are perhaps a bit too good since it affects the game’s optimization and FPS. Lowering the graphical settings can help out, but not a whole lot.
Sound
As far as the sound design goes, it’s okay. This is of course if we ignore the cringe-worthy voice-acting we mentioned in the story section. The game’s soundscape is not nearly as impressive as the graphics, but the sound effects and music are immersive enough. It helps bring out the game’s environment to life and it gives the gameplay that little oomph it needs.
Gameplay
Seed of Life is an action-adventure platformer that is mildly puzzle-minded and heavily exploration-based. It takes around three to five hours to finish, depending on how keen you are on exploring and how good you are at platforming. The idea behind the gameplay is to explore the planet’s nooks and crannies, overcome obstacles (platforms) by using your gained abilities, and collect as much Lumium as possible to help make your journey to The Seed easier.
What’s good about the gameplay are the many elements you need to keep track of while playing the game; it’s not just running around and exploring. All over the planet Lumia, you can collect capsules that give you special abilities such as superhuman vision, sprinting, jumping, regenerating health, etc. These abilities help you with platforming and roaming around in the dangerous world. Just be sure you know when to use these powers and for how long, because the capsules need juice. That’s why it’s useful to collect as much Lumium you can find. This same Lumium is also used to open gates among other things. Besides keeping an eye out for your Lumium depletion, you also need to look at your health. Luckily, you received a talisman on which you can easily see how much of your Lumium and health is depleted. That same talisman also helps you guide you to your quest point.
Sounds okay so far, right? Well, there’s also a downside to what we mentioned. The depletion of said health and Lumium goes pretty fast, making exploring the planet fairly difficult to do and frankly not worth it. There’s nothing special to find anyway besides more Lumium. The game also uses checkpoints instead of manual saves which are activated immediately when you pass by. This makes restarting at a certain point a living hell. Especially, when you keep dying due to clunky controls and awkward camera angles. This makes the game almost impossible to play at times since most of the game consists of platforming. The game offers the option to play with either controller or a traditional keyboard and mouse set-up. Sadly, this did not make controlling the game any better.
Conclusion
Overall, Seed of Life isn’t all that bad. It has good potential, but playing it felt so unrewarding. It’s not giving us much. Right now, there are just way more bad points than good ones. For an indie game like this, it’s pretty decent, it just needs better execution and polishing. The game has enjoyable sceneries and fairly okay sound design, and the lore seems intriguing. The story-telling of it, however, needs to be more consistent and told in more attractive ways. We keep on discovering new information that Cora blatantly tells us in her unbearably slow, monotonous voice, but this delivery completely misses its mark. The controls were also detracting from the overall quality of the game, and the gameplay itself proved to be tedious. Since the game focuses so much on platforming and exploring, this took the fun out of it. The game is definitely not doomed, but just like Lumia, it needs a whole lot of love.
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