Seed of Life

Whether it’s the lackluster visuals, or the pretty significant performance hiccups, this port has issues

Seed of Life is a semi-open world puzzle platformer from MadLight Games, published by Leonardo Interactive. The game follows Cora, the last known survivor on the planet Lumia, as she seeks to restore life to her dying homeworld. An alien race – the Namurians – had drained its precious Lumium resources and left the planet to perish. After her grandfather fails to return home, and darkness continues to befall the land, she becomes determined to follow in his footsteps and find the ‘Seed of Life’ – a device that holds the key to restoring light and life to Lumia.

3D platformer, set in a 4-hour long sci-fi/medieval universe, will offer a whole lot of frustrating puzzles, bunch of bugs, colorful and crisp graphics, but most of all an enjoyable, nonrepetitive experience.

Fans of platformers might find Seed of Life to be a smidge more fun than puzzle game fanatics, but the overall experience in this beautiful, dying world is worth the time and price point, especially as a relatively short game that can be completed over a lazy weekend. Much like Cora's quest, the seeds of this game are high quality, and with some fine tuning and care, Seed of Life could blossom into something incredible.

Seed of Life is a bit disappointing for me, as I've been following the game for a long time and was looking forward to turning it on for the first time. I understand that only two developers worked on the title and they really did a great job in terms of making the world look nice graphically. In my opinion, the game should have been released first at least in Early Access, during which time they could have tweaked all the details and existing issues. The price of 22,99 € doesn't seem adequate for the current state of the game. For my part, I can't recommend the title with a clear conscience, but I'm sure there will be those who will enjoy Seed of Life with all its features. The world of Lumia is impressive, but unfortunately that's not enough.

Although Seed of Life is a rough game at times, with questionable decisions and rather poor performance, it is also a full-fledged adventure, with freedom, exploration, and good ideas. It is in your power to forgive him his mistakes, or not to do it.

All in all, Seed of Life has all the tools it needs to sprout a lovely little flower, but it’ll need to take special care to groom and care for itself to get there. There’s a good number of thorns in this garden, so you should approach with caution, knowing this. But you can see where Seed of Life tried its best to shine, so if you’re itching to take a hike through alien lands, Seed of Life is a charming enough indie gem to keep you well-watered for a few hours.

The story may be a little on the by-the-numbers side of things but the audio-visual presentation and specially the spectacularly fun and deep gameplay more than make up for that one flaw.

Overall, Seed of Life is a game with unique ideas and wonderful worldbuilding, but it needs to heavily refine the parts that matter most. In its current form, Seed of Life is a fantastic proof of concept prototype but an easy to skip final product. While it doesn't take long to beat, due in part to the ability to navigate the world in unintended ways thanks to easily exploitable bugs, it leaves a lasting negative impression that could have been avoided with a little more time spent developing out from its early promise.

Seed of Life is a title that, in its current state, is really bad in almost every aspect and the only hope lies in future updates.