WILL: Follow The Light is a gorgeous and uneven journey across grief, family, and open water, at its best when it lets the sea speak for itself
WILL: Follow The Light is the kind of game I ended up liking more than I expected, even while constantly wishing it was a little sharper. It has atmosphere, beautiful environments, and a very specific sadness running through it. It also has clumsy pacing, frustrating puzzles, and a story that keeps circling deeper ideas without always making them clear.
I played it through Xbox Play Anywhere, which meant I could move between my ROG Xbox Ally X and Xbox Series X without any hassle. On the Ally X, the game runs at around 45fps in the Low graphical mode. It does not look spectacular there, and the lighting is flatter, but it looks fine and feels smooth enough for this kind of slow adventure. On Xbox Series X, though, it is a different story. The game looks fantastic, with great lighting, dramatic vistas, and lots of small environmental details that give its islands and coastal settlements real texture.
You play as Will, a lighthouse keeper living in a remote northern region. After a devastating mudslide hits his small village, he learns that his son was apparently with his grandfather at the time, and both of them are now missing. That sends Will on a journey across islands, damaged towns, and cold open water as he searches for clues about where they went and what happened.
The basic setup is strong. A lighthouse keeper searching for his son after a natural disaster has immediate emotional weight, and the game understands the loneliness of that premise. You spend a lot of time walking through quiet places, reading notes, listening to people, and moving from one lead to the next. The routines around the lighthouse, the radio chatter, the small village details, and the way the sea always feels present all help sell the world.
Then the game starts getting strange, and that is where my feelings became more mixed. WILL: Follow The Light clearly wants to touch on grief, guilt, family trauma, and the way parents repeat the same mistakes made by their own parents. Will's relationship with his father feels central to that. There is a sense that he may be doing to his son what his father did to him, emotionally abandoning him while hiding behind duty and distance. That could have been powerful, but the arc never fully clicked for me.
Part of the issue is the pacing. The game has several odd cuts where you reach a destination, something happens, and then Will wakes up later with just enough new information to continue. Sometimes this creates mystery. Other times it feels like the game skipped the connective tissue that would have made the emotional beats land harder.
It also borders on surreal and supernatural ideas, but never fully commits to them. With a setup like this, it would be easy to assume the game is building toward cosmic horror or something more overtly Lovecraftian. It is not really that. There are dreamlike moments where reality feels unstable, but they mostly hover around the edges. I kept waiting for it to either stay grounded or go all in on the weirdness.
The sailing is easily one of the best parts. Will travels on his sailboat, Molly, and I enjoyed having to manage the sails and keep the wind hitting them properly. It gives movement across the sea a tactile rhythm. You are adjusting, watching the wind, and letting the boat cut through the waves. On Series X especially, these sections can look stunning.
At the same time, sailing is more relaxing than demanding. There are not many real fail states while you are out on the water, and the game even lets you skip sailing altogether if you do not want to deal with it. I appreciate that option, but it also undercuts the system. When the best mechanic can be bypassed almost completely, it starts feeling more like flavor than a core pillar.
The puzzles are less successful. Some are simple environmental interactions, and those are fine. The weaker ones feel like trial and error rather than deduction. There is one puzzle where you need to complete a winch, and it throws a huge pile of parts at you. Instead of studying the machine and logically figuring out where each component belongs, I mostly picked up objects and checked whether the placement indicator turned green. That is not really puzzle solving. That is testing props until the game accepts one.
Controller input makes these moments more annoying than they should be. Selecting the correct piece does not always feel reliable, especially when several objects are close together. Since the puzzles are already not asking for much thinking, fighting the interaction system makes them feel even flatter.
What kept me invested was the atmosphere. Even when the writing was unclear or the pacing stumbled, I enjoyed being in this world. The environments carry a lot of emotion by themselves. Small rooms, weathered docks, machinery, abandoned paths, and wide views of the sea all communicate a life shaped by isolation and routine.
That is why the Series X version impressed me so much. The game relies heavily on mood, lighting, and environmental detail, and the console version gives those elements room to breathe. The Ally X version is perfectly playable and genuinely convenient, especially because of Play Anywhere, but this is one of those games where stronger visuals matter.
WILL: Follow The Light is not a clean hit, but I enjoyed it. It has a strong premise, beautiful locations, enjoyable sailing, and enough emotional ambition to make the journey worthwhile. It also has awkward story transitions, shallow puzzles, and themes that needed clearer focus. If you like slow narrative adventures and do not mind some rough edges, there is something here worth experiencing, especially on Series X. Thanks for reading!
