The art, visuals, scenery and backgrounds are incredible. While exotic, the watercolor art style grew on me rather quickly.
The setting, the world of Lemuria, is immersive and epic, with diverse locations, races, creatures, and mysterious lore.
The side-scrolling exploration and puzzle solving (often involving Igniculus) inspire the feeling of adventure.
Engaging Active Time Battle mechanics. The time meter requires careful timing and precision, knowing when to attack and when to defend. Trying to interrupt opponents while they are acting and the threat of being interrupted yourself adds suspense. Igniculus slows down enemies, adding a small twitch gameplay element and even more suspense.
The music is beautiful, and sets the tone rather well, especially during boss fights.
All the game's elements collectively form a very deep atmosphere that shifts between somber, ethereal, epic, and overall elegant.
That includes the rhyming aspect, which gives the game a poetic flair...
Flaws
...but like rhyming children's books, there are moments of Painful Rhyme.
Only two party members can be active at once, so switching out members increases and gets pointlessly complex as the game progresses.
Igniculus can also heal you, but it takes several seconds to heal yourself substantially, which requires patience.
You level up frequently, and each time have to allocate skills manually to a character. It can get tedious to pause and select skills repeatedly.
The ending feels rushed. I won't spoil the story, but according to the game's writer (warning: link has spoilers), there was meant to be a final level before the last battle, but it was cut. While the level was supposedly only gameplay and not story-based, I think this level would have given the player more time to digest what was happening in the narrative, and also give time for final character interactions. The ending wasn't terrible, but too much stuff happens too quickly.
Other
The game has normal and hard difficulty levels (casual and expert after a patch). I started casual, which was pretty easy, but the game's mechanics were good enough to be engaging anyways. After becoming familiar with the game I decided to change difficulty to expert (you can do that at any time), and it got decently challenging. If you're uncertain about difficulty, you can start casual, and move to expert when you feel ready. Just don't do that before a boss or anything.
This game feels traditional in many respects, including the story, but I feel it has enough clever twists to be appealing.
Overall, this game's a great, unique experience I'd highly recommend.
Child of Light Review
Pros
Flaws
Other
Overall, this game's a great, unique experience I'd highly recommend.