WILL: Follow The Light

My honest reaction after the first hour of WILL: Follow The Light was something close to cautious wonder. You open the game doing lighthouse-keeper chores, reading weather instruments, fixing a generator, adjusting sails on an incoming storm, and the whole routine has a slow, tactile weight that most walking-sim-adjacent games never bother to earn. TomorrowHead Studio, a self-funded debut team with a background in CGI, has clearly spent real time thinking about what isolation feels like before the drama even starts. When the mudslide hits Will's hometown and his son Thomas vanishes with his estranged grandfather, the setup lands with genuine stakes. The sailing is where the game earns the most goodwill. Aboard the ageing yacht Molly, you manually adjust sails, read the weather, manage currents, and steer through shifting northern fog. A late-game sequence navigating around an aggressive whale and drifting icebergs is exactly the kind of set-piece the trailers promised. Dog-sled traversal across snowy mountain passes adds a second mode of movement that feels physically distinct, with the sled reacting to terrain weight and sharp turns. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and the northern wilderness genuinely justifies that choice: coastal towns, frozen fjords, and storm-lit sea all hold up under scrutiny. The soundtrack is the other clear win, a sparse and experimental blend that fades into wind and wave sounds before quietly pressing on your chest at the moments that matter most. The cracks, though, are real and worth knowing about. Puzzle design is inconsistent at best. The fuse-box switch puzzle appears multiple times in quick succession, which kills any sense of discovery. Some puzzles suffer from a genuine lack of signposting, leaving you trial-and-erroring through object combinations without any clear logic to follow. The NPC presentation is the bigger disappointment: character models are often stiff, lip-syncing lags behind the scenery quality by a generation, and the voice acting outside of Cissy Jones (who voices Ila) can feel flat in scenes that need emotional lift. The story's generational arc, fathers and sons repeating each other's mistakes across lighthouse postings, is sincerely felt and occasionally lands hard. But the final third loses momentum, and several reviewers across the board found the ending underwhelming after a genuinely affecting middle stretch. There is also no manual save, and auto-checkpoints are infrequent enough to cause real frustration if you quit mid-puzzle. Who is this for? If you have a soft spot for Firewatch-era atmospheric first-person adventures, if you can forgive a slow open and tolerate some rough NPC edges, and if the idea of genuinely simulated sailing in a grief-soaked Arctic setting sounds like your kind of evening, WILL has something real to offer. The team is actively patching, with a large update focused on additional save points, puzzle balancing, and UI improvements already confirmed in the roadmap. This is a debut project that aimed high, landed unevenly, and still left me thinking about Will's lighthouse long after the credits. That counts for something.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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