put Plourde and Yohalem to work on next? Nope. Wrong. “From the start, I wanted to make a game that would be the complete opposite of Far Cry 3: poetic instead of violent, nostalgic instead of psychotic,” Plourde tells Red Bull. “Child of Light is created to generate a different set of emotions. It’s important for me to be able to change tone from one project to another, otherwise it gets boring.” Child of Light doesn't do pirates or tigers or bloody, knife-throwing takedown moves. Instead, Ubisoft is promising gamers a living painting; a children's fairy tale rendered in swirling watercolors that follows a tiny heroine on a journey through the mystical land of Lemuria. It couldn't be less like its predecessor. As Yohalem puts it: “Far Cry 3 raged, Child of Light builds. While Far Cry 3 came from a place of subversion and anger, this game is about hope.” But where games like American McGee's Alice or Grimm trade in taking the fairy tale storybook aesthetic and perverting it to gruesome effect, Child of Light sticks close to the classic themes of children's stories: good versus evil and the heroes challenges of growing up. “I was really inspired by the artists of the golden age of illustration: Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, John Bauer and Kay Nielsen,” says Plourde. “They mostly illustrated children books, especially fairy tales and their artwork is really amazing.” “So while I built up a bank of images that I liked I came to realise that most fairy tales are about growing up; the passage from childhood to adulthood and that the gameplay of RPGs is also about growing up, from weak to strong. It gave me a hook to build the game around.”

Child of Light will also be a sharp break for most gamers in gameplay terms. Rather than dropping players into the first or third-person perspective of a Western RPG, Child of Light plays out on a flat background, with sickly heroine Aurora (looking not at all unlike like a painting of Merida from the Disney movie Brave) awaking in a magical world that she explores in side-scrolling 2.5 dimensions – with the background and foreground layered on top of each other like a theatre set. As you'd expect from any good magical dreamworld, Aurora's is filled with characters and towns she can interact with an accept quests from, new allies to make and a looming and terrible evil to thwart – in this case, the malevolent Black Queen who has gone and run off with the sun, moon and stars, which isn’t really on. As in any good fairy tale, Aurora isn't alone in her quest. So far, the team has revealed just the one companion for her: a floating blue-ish white orb called Igniculus. The companion system is where the game's drop-in-drop-out co-op comes in. While you can play through Aurora's adventure solo, a second player can take control of her companion (which span all castes of magical archetype from healer to elemental mage) and use their special abilities to help explore hidden areas or solve puzzles. In Igniculus' case, that means drifting through walls to spring open loot chests or traps – but the characters that Aurora can pair herself with are more than just sentient utility knives or anthropomorphised key fobs. “Igniculus came into being when Aurora enters Lemuria, so she has a parental relationship with him,” says Yohalem. “Her simple wisdom about the world is passed on. As they both grow, her truths become more complex and, ultimately, their relationship changes. There is a key turning point that I won’t spoil, but the friendship becomes more complicated and is never the same afterward.”

Child of Light will also be a sharp break for most gamers in gameplay terms. Rather than dropping players into the first or third-person perspective of a Western RPG, Child of Light plays out on a flat background, with sickly heroine Aurora (looking not at all unlike like a painting of Merida from the Disney movie Brave) awaking in a magical world that she explores in side-scrolling 2.5 dimensions – with the background and foreground layered on top of each other like a theatre set. As you'd expect from any good magical dreamworld, Aurora's is filled with characters and towns she can interact with an accept quests from, new allies to make and a looming and terrible evil to thwart – in this case, the malevolent Black Queen who has gone and run off with the sun, moon and stars, which isn’t really on. As in any good fairy tale, Aurora isn't alone in her quest. So far, the team has revealed just the one companion for her: a floating blue-ish white orb called Igniculus. The companion system is where the game's drop-in-drop-out co-op comes in. While you can play through Aurora's adventure solo, a second player can take control of her companion (which span all castes of magical archetype from healer to elemental mage) and use their special abilities to help explore hidden areas or solve puzzles. In Igniculus' case, that means drifting through walls to spring open loot chests or traps – but the characters that Aurora can pair herself with are more than just sentient utility knives or anthropomorphised key fobs. “Igniculus came into being when Aurora enters Lemuria, so she has a parental relationship with him,” says Yohalem. “Her simple wisdom about the world is passed on. As they both grow, her truths become more complex and, ultimately, their relationship changes. There is a key turning point that I won’t spoil, but the friendship becomes more complicated and is never the same afterward.”

Child of Light will also be a sharp break for most gamers in gameplay terms. Rather than dropping players into the first or third-person perspective of a Western RPG, Child of Light plays out on a flat background, with sickly heroine Aurora (looking not at all unlike like a painting of Merida from the Disney movie Brave) awaking in a magical world that she explores in side-scrolling 2.5 dimensions – with the background and foreground layered on top of each other like a theatre set. As you'd expect from any good magical dreamworld, Aurora's is filled with characters and towns she can interact with an accept quests from, new allies to make and a looming and terrible evil to thwart – in this case, the malevolent Black Queen who has gone and run off with the sun, moon and stars, which isn’t really on. As in any good fairy tale, Aurora isn't alone in her quest. So far, the team has revealed just the one companion for her: a floating blue-ish white orb called Igniculus. The companion system is where the game's drop-in-drop-out co-op comes in. While you can play through Aurora's adventure solo, a second player can take control of her companion (which span all castes of magical archetype from healer to elemental mage) and use their special abilities to help explore hidden areas or solve puzzles. In Igniculus' case, that means drifting through walls to spring open loot chests or traps – but the characters that Aurora can pair herself with are more than just sentient utility knives or anthropomorphised key fobs. “Igniculus came into being when Aurora enters Lemuria, so she has a parental relationship with him,” says Yohalem. “Her simple wisdom about the world is passed on. As they both grow, her truths become more complex and, ultimately, their relationship changes. There is a key turning point that I won’t spoil, but the friendship becomes more complicated and is never the same afterward.”