Light

The first thing that hit us was the spartan visual finish, the second was the pulsating soundtrack, the third was the end credits.

Light is lean offering, an indie game based around stealth and high score chasing. It's lean in terms of story, it's lean in terms of visual detail, it's lean in terms of length. Luckily, it's not lean when it comes to playability.

Our pass through the twelve levels on offer here took us just over an hour. Not long in the grand scheme of things. However, it felt like an hour well spent. There's opportunity to revisit completed levels and aim for higher scores and quicker runs, but you can really see all you need to in around sixty minutes.

The brevity of the experience is complimented by some straightforward systems that are easy to get to grips with. The player-character is represented onscreen by a light blue square, his line of sight illuminating 360 degrees around (you can see out the back of your head - the benefits of not having a face perhaps). Other people are illustrated in the same manner, only they're white, while enemies are bright red, and mission-specific targets are purple. You can also, on occasion, find a disguise that changes your colour and makes it slightly easier to move around a level. Objectives, such as hackable computers and important documents, are yellow. There's a clarity to the visual language that's nice and no-nonsense.

Movement of your square is controlled via WASD, while a mouse-driven cursor allows you to extend your field of vision by pressing and holding the Right Mouse Button and moving the screen. Using these simple controls you move through levels, avoiding enemy patrols, completing objectives, and then getting the hell out at the end before you're caught and killed.

The plot - and we're not going to tell you anything that we weren't told in advance - is a mixture of the classic amnesia narrative mixed with another classic, the corporate conspiracy story. It's not super original, but it's fit for purpose. We're told the tale via text boxes between levels, and through documents read during missions. As we try to unpick what happened to our character, and work out how that fits within the wider conspiracy, we have to explore a variety of security-filled environments without being discovered.

The stealth systems are, like the rest of the game, fairly straightforward. If you get spotted an enemy's cone of vision turns red, and if they get too close they'll send you back to the start of a mission with a blast from their gun. If you can catch a guard unawares, a tap on the Space Bar will kill them (though you get a bonus completing a level without killing anyone). You can drag their four-sided body away and stash it, and it's generally a good idea to do so because when a body is discovered a timer starts up, and after two minutes the level is flooded with additional reinforcements. The guards actually have fairly simple AI, and if you can avoid their predictable gaze, you can walk straight past them.

There's security cameras that can also spot you, and locked doors partition off certain sections of the levels (red doors are controlled by nearby computer terminals that must be hacked, yellow doors can be unlocked via pressing and holding E, white doors open automatically). Computer terminals allow you to hack doors and cameras via pressing Q; the attached security systems are highlighted and a singular click on the relevant pop-up deactivates the said system. It's not complicated at all, and there's no mini-game to navigate; it's just a simple click.

That simplicity is a defining factor, but it's done in a way here that's elegant and purposeful. Much of our enjoyment came from the way that these basic systems gelled together. While there's nothing genre-defining or groundbreaking here, there's some heart-pumping moments to be had, whether that be the thrill of waltzing through a level undiscovered for a perfect run, or from taking out a slew of guards and making it to the exit before a wave of enemies descends on you.

Overall our experience was positive. However. Light is going to retail at £9.99/$12.99/€11,99 - considering that you can complete the game in such a short period of time, it doesn't feel like great value. Even a campaign twice as long would've felt a little short, and so for the price being quoted it's not a straightforward recommendation. A level editor would've gone down well; knowing that player-created content would be following later might have eased our concerns.

As it stands Light offers a really solid hour or two of game, but not a lot more. We'll leave it to you to decide whether that's worth the price of admission. If you see it going cheap in a sale, then certainly give it some extra consideration, because we'd happily up the score if the package felt like it was better value for money than it currently is.