New release: Light Apprentice Episode 1

The premise:

The story starts when Nate is awaken from his 300 years sleep, by blueling wizard Tlob. He discovers that all he cherished was lost during the Great War. Now he is the only key for saving the world from total destruction.

It’s not exactly the most captivating narrative I’ve ever heard, but the game does benefit from a stylistic way of conveying the story, so it’s not all bad.

Combat involves Paper Mario-style timed button presses to maximize attack effectiveness, which boosts engagement. On the other hand, with only two party members, little enemy variety, and a very limited selection of abilities, the combat gets repetitive pretty quickly regardless.

Light Apprentice promises to tie character progression to player choice. Igor writes:

in our system, the main stats are Strength, Agility, Intelligence and Armor, and these will evolve linearly in classic fashion with XP, as in say, FFVI or Chrono Trigger. But our system is rather unique when it comes to customization, because we are going away from the traditional grinding. We have character customization entirely based on the consequences of your choices in the story and the way you handle the options given to you in-game.

The two main actions in the first chapter are Attack and Defense, and as the story unfolds, the characters will get certain Skills that are complementary to these actions. Depending on your decisions, the story (which is told in a comic book format, as you probably have already seen) will branch out into different paths. Each path will help build your characters’ personalities, reflected in Trait Points, which influence directly the Skills you’ve got.

As of now, you can try the different outcomes possible: if you defeat your enemy by attacking it, or defending > stunning > fleeing battle, to have a better feeling of how our core mechanics come into play. As we are still in beta version, we will be implementing some features like Trait Points as they become more relevant to the story in subsequent chapters.

The first episode is available to play for free online right here; it will eventually see release on iOS and Android as well. A second episode is planned, to be priced at $0.99; subsequent episodes will be $1.99 apiece.