By a total coincidence, this week's game is another published by Toge Productions - a studio putting out the best the Indonesian Indie scene has to offer, including last week's MagiCat - and like many of the games covered in my concurrent January series, Go! Go! GOTY!, has something of an environmentalist theme. She and the Light Bearer is a fairytale adventure game about a firefly attempting to awaken "Mother": a creator deity that has long since vanished from the world. The firefly's journey takes her through a dense thicket, gaining assistance from the local flora as she gets deeper towards the forest's heart where Mother is said to be resting. In a framing story, the legend of the firefly is being told to a group of children by the village elder as a means to explain the root of their customs and the purpose of an upcoming "Day of Offering," presenting the fable as both an adventuresome campfire tale for children and as a traditional origin myth.

True to its nature as a yarn for kids, the game is very gentle with its puzzles and is probably intended for a younger audience, or at least one that isn't looking for anything too demanding. The presentation is more the focus here, with some excellent, detailed picture book backgrounds and character designs and an atmospheric light jazz soundtrack that both do a fine job immersing the player in this arboreal fantasy world of talking plants and heroic trials of character through which the firefly must prove herself. It has its spooky side too: this world is slowly being corrupted and destroyed by shadowy fiends named Devourers, and attempts to return to earlier parts of the forest make evident that they're quickly closing in on its center and intend to reach Mother before the firefly can. What puzzles there are mostly rely on observation and delivering what items and information the NPCs ask for, and hotspots usually blink to indicate their presence as soon as you enter a screen. As the whole game is about ten screens long, you're unlikely to get stuck for long on any one instance.

It may be a mere wisp of a game from a mechanical standpoint, but what mechanics there are well-considered for the type of casual audience the game hopes to reach. For instance, there's a musical puzzle towards the end that requires you reproduce a nine-note piece of music on a harp; recognizing that not everyone is musically inclined, however, the game ensures that each note is accompanied by a symbol and the player can simply replicate the correct sequence of those instead. Along with the above hotspot visibility and some generous NPC hints, it seems a game purpose-built to offer a traditional point-and-click experience with absolutely none of the confusion and frustration that might occur with the usual mental roadblocks. Of course, if you're a fan of frequently getting stuck until you have the epiphany needed to solve the moon logic, Rube Goldberg-ass machinations most games in this genre demand you suss out with your own wits and endless patience before you're allowed to move on, I don't think She and the Light Bearer is going to keep you occupied for much more than a couple of hours. Not all adventure games have to be that, granted, and most modern ones are assuredly not.

I wish I had more to say, but such is the nature of an adventure game that is brief, deliberately simple in structure and narrative themes alike, owes much to its presentation as a key aspect of its appeal, and has its game design subtly tweaked towards being as accessible as possible. I doubt it made too many 2019 GOTY lists from serious publications, but at the same time I don't doubt it's going to set some impressionable youth onto other colorful adventure games about having the courage to push onwards with the help of your friends. As for Toge Productions, I'm sure I'll meet them again for this feature before the year is over: after all, their conversational 2020 game Coffee Talk is another I have sitting in my Itch.io library.

Rating: 4 out of 5.