Will: Follow The Light Review – Our Son Is In Another Lighthouse!

One of my favourite things about walking sims is how they allow you to get lost in a moment. In Firewatch, we’re given plenty of time to soak in the nature that surrounds us as we work to protect a national forest; in The Invincible, we’ll wander vast empty plains of a derelict planet in search of an escape; and in Eclipsium, we will spend most of our time moving from one gorgeous pixelated hellscape to another. All of these are achieved through the minimal gameplay input that walking sims are most known for.

TomorrowHead Studio’s Will: Follow the Light revolves around sailing, most notably travelling across a stormy sea between islands to find our son. With its sailing mechanics, players are often given plenty of moments to simply sit and enjoy the ride, surrounded by the ocean, beautiful skies, and a stunning soundtrack. Unfortunately for Will: Follow the Light, while it absolutely nails these moments, it’s everything in between where things start to go wrong.

Will is a lighthouse keeper whose shift is interrupted when his town is destroyed by a mudslide. Rushing home to check on his son’s wellbeing, he finds him and his father missing. Driven by paternal devotion, Will endures blistering winds and turbulent seas, he climbs to the highest rooms of the highest lighthouses of various islands in search of his son, who… he is told shortly after finding out that he’s missing has actually just gone on a boat trip with his grandpa. While Will has some grievances with his father stemming from his upbringing, this revelation hardly justifies Will putting his life, and the lives of others who volunteer to help him on this quest (including a pack of sledge dogs who he has charging through avalanches and breaking ice) in danger. In fact, this reveal breaks the tension of the game entirely and from that point on, I was immensely uninterested in this journey.

Travelling on his boat, Will’s search takes him from island to island, with each landing involving a search of the area for the next clue of where his father and son could have gone. This search usually involves doing some menial chores, including the video game favourite of ‘get the generator working again’. In fact, Will must be something of a bad omen for generators because every generator he comes across seems to break down on him as we end up doing this multiple times throughout the game. While there are moments where the developers at least attempted to include some kind of puzzle into the gameplay, the vast majority of the player’s time is spent looking for fuses, fixing things, and getting the damn generator working again. As you can imagine, at nearly ten hours long, Will: Follow the Light grew tedious very quickly.

There’s some sailing gameplay in the way of knowing when to drive the boat using the engine and when to switch to the sails, and also plotting the journey before we leave the dock. But besides that, much like sailing itself, this aspect of the gameplay mostly consists of just enjoying the views as, unlike real-life sailing, getting things wrong, even during storms, poses little to no risk.

I also struggled somewhat with the objectives as I often found that they didn’t give enough information for me to know exactly what I was supposed to be doing next. They’ll often state something vague, not noting down any of Will’s comments on what he needs to do next just in case the player didn’t catch it. But while the objectives are incredibly vague, I also found that Will’s constant commentary to be overbearing at times – there was no in-between of giving a good indication of what to do next and breathing down the player’s neck so they can’t figure it out for themselves. There were also quite a few occasions where the game would give me sailing technical jargon and assume I knew what it meant, ‘find the azimuth’ being the most glaring one – I had no idea what an azimuth was, and I’m still not entirely sure.

Some of its best moments in Will: Follow the Light came from the visuals; as the game progresses, the weather takes a turn, and somehow the visuals always take some of the most beautiful elements of each moment, from a fork of lightning opening up the sky on a dark and stormy night, to birds circling above in the fog. If a scenic sailing game is what you’re looking for, Will: Follow the Light is at least partly this.

Unfortunately as a walking sim, it also needs to rely heavily on its plot to garner player interest and manages to fail at this from the get-go by immediately killing its own tension by assuring the player that Will’s son is perfectly safe. There are further mysteries to uncover as we gradually learn about what happened to Will’s wife and his relationships with his son and father, but with the main driving force behind his turbulent journey being incredibly lacking, these story bits aren’t enough to keep the intrigue going. Combine that with utterly dull gameplay, and I really lost the will to care about anything that was going on only a couple of hours in.

While Will: Follow the Light does have a touching story to tell about a man struggling to stop himself from repeating his father’s mistakes, unfortunately the dialogue struggles to effectively carry this theme in a meaningful way. It’s often filled with awkward exposition at the worst possible times, taking away the emotion by making these characters nothing more than video game NPCs driving the plot forward. When walking through his devastated town as its residents mourn the loss of their homes and the lives of others, Will is chatting about the good ol’ days with the locals. When finding his friend injured in the church, which has been turned into a makeshift infirmary for the mudslide victims, he reminisces to her about the time he got married there. Will: read the room.

This exposition somehow forces its way into nearly every single conversation, not only killing the immersion but also any natural intrigue behind these characters. “Your son is with your father.” “Ah, yes, my father, who I have a bad relationship with.” It doesn’t help that when Will himself is introduced, the majority of his dialogue consists of his endless whining about having to pick up his colleague’s chores while he covers for them. It’s not a good first impression, and if this isn’t enough to put you off his character, then his complete overreaction and putting others’ lives in harm’s way because of it certainly will. And to make matters worse, Will also suffers from a bad case of ‘tutorial dialogue’, where the developers felt the need to force a comment from him during your every move when solving a puzzle. A winch assembly puzzle, one of the only well-thought-out puzzles in the game, is made unbearable by Will’s constant unnecessary input the very second you pick up a piece, saying “it’s too early for this now” and not allowing the player a mere moment to just figure that out for themselves.

The dialogue issues also come from a technical standpoint, as there were quite a few moments where the voice acting felt really off – especially during particularly emotional scenes where the delivery was almost as though the voice actor wasn’t aware of the context they were speaking in, or the line was intended for another scene and was stitched in. This was so severe that one key and emotional story moment came off as very confusing as a result of the dialogue being too casual for what was going on.

And this extended to the soundtrack too, as while the strings-focused score was gorgeous and perfect for a sailing game, it wasn’t utilised often enough during intense situations or scenes that were supposed to be fairly emotional. Instead, we would ride out dangerous storms to nothing but some flat audio design, which was another issue in itself.

I experienced a lot of problems with the audio cues too. There were times where I would be given a directional audio clue too late because the area wasn’t designed in a way to accurately predict where I would go to first; I would often trigger an audio cue of what I needed to do next either too early or too late, making following the vague objectives even more confusing.

Will: Follow the Light is a sailing game which delivers breathtaking visuals and little else. While its story had potential, the game goes out of its way to deliver it in the worst way possible, while serving up gameplay which only succeeds in making the experience tedious overall.

Jess reviewed Will: Follow the Light on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.