TomorrowHead Studio are behind WILL: Follow The Light, a game that really wants you to believe its story is the main event. It wants to be deep. It wants to be emotional. It wants to grab you by the heartstrings and drag you through the Norwegian wilderness. But does it?

“Dive into a realistic, single-player, first-person journey through the harsh northern latitudes as you sail endless waters, searching for a way back to your loved ones. Will you follow the light?”

The game kicks off brilliantly. You’re Will, lighthouse keeper, father, and dream‑sequence enjoyer. After a cracking opening on a boat, you’re thrown into prepping for a monster storm. You’re checking instruments, watching the weather turn, feeling the tension build. Then the storm hits, the village gets flattened by a mudslide, and your son is missing.

Great stuff. Proper drama. High stakes. Deep emotion. You’re ready to tear your way through the country like a Norwegian Liam Neeson. And then… you find out that your son is with his grandad. Not trapped, not injured, not swept away by the storm. He’s with the old man. So the game goes from “my son is missing in a natural disaster” to “I’m basically going to pick him up from gramps.” The emotional balloon deflates so fast you can hear it squeal. And that’s the theme of the whole experience: strong starts, disappointing middles, and endings that wander off for a nap.

Now, let’s talk walking. Because you’ll be doing a lot of it, a lot. Yeah, this is really one of those walking sim games with a few bells and whistles. To break up the walking, the game throws puzzles at you. Not clever puzzles. Not fun puzzles. Not creative puzzles. Just the kind of puzzles that feel like the developers Googled “game puzzle ideas” and clicked the first result. Allow me to highlight the fuse‑box puzzle. You meet this one early doors in the game’s opening, and you have to flick switches in the right order to get the fuse-box working. Fine. But then you do it again soon after…. and again directly after that. In fact, those last two times are part of an overly long and annoying bit. You do the exact same fuse-box puzzle three times in under forty minutes. At that point, it stops being a puzzle and starts being a cry for help. Oh, and during those forty minutes… there’s another puzzle that you do twice.

But the sailing sections? They’re fantastic, genuinely brilliant. It’s a very tactile experience, detailed, immersive. You’re hauling ropes, adjusting sails, fighting the wind. The sailing is the one part of the game that feels alive and an utter joy to experience. Even just taking in the Nordic scenery is a pleasure. There’s also a husky-sledging bit that’s good fun, though it’s over quicker than a British summer.

Sadly, everything between those moments is… well… beige. The story fizzles out before you’ve even settled in. The dialogue is bizarre; it feels like someone fed ChatGPT a Norwegian to English dictionary and asked it to write a script. And the voice acting? Everyone has this stilted English accent… In Norway. It’s so stiff, robotic, and massively out of place. It’s like someone has badly dubbed a Scandinavian drama show. I half expected someone to say “I am experiencing human emotions” in a monotone.

And that’s the tragedy here. There is a good game buried somewhere under the awful dialogue, banal story, and repeated fuse-box puzzles. The sailing proves it. But the rest? Bland, repetitive, and weirdly hollow. WILL: Follow The Light is out now on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox for about £20. If it were a tenner, I’d say grab it for the sailing alone (it’s great). But at twenty quid? Skip it.