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A Lighted Story
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About the game
A Lighted Story is a game you read and play at the same time. The screen is almost black, and a single line of story appears at the top, one sentence per scene. Between the lines you walk a tiny glowing dot through a dark place, and what you do with it is the plot: it is a love story, told in about twenty scenes, and it only moves forward when you reach the end of each one.
The narrator is afraid of lights. In this world they are not friendly: glowing orbs drift and circle through the narrow rooms, and touching one burns. So the early scenes are a quiet exercise in dodging: slip past the orbs, find the shadowed corners and keep going. You can run by holding Space, but running slowly uses up your health, so you save it for the moments that need it. Then someone appears, wounded and shining, and the journey, the mountains, the old mazes and the misty grasslands that follow, stops being a lonely one. I will not tell you what happens when the lights come back; it is worth finding out for yourself.
The pictures are drawn in a soft, hand-made style, the music (several tracks, some of them from the authors' earlier game Tomorrow) is calm and slightly sad, and the story is told with very few words. A title screen lets you choose the difficulty, from "Reading", where the game is gentle enough to follow the story without worrying, to "Suicide", for people who like to lose.
Playing it here
Click Play, then choose "Start Game" on the title screen. Your progress is saved in this browser as you go, so the next time you can pick "Continue". Pressing R on the title screen clears the saved game. The title screen also lets you switch between English and Simplified Chinese and turn the music on or off. Press P or Esc at any time to pause. The game picks the keyboard version or the touch version on its own; on a phone it shows an on-screen control panel and runs best in landscape.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| arrow keys or WASD | move |
| hold Space | run (slowly spends health) |
| P or Esc | pause and resume |
| Enter | skip the current line of the story |
| M | music on and off |
| , and . | lower and raise the volume |
| R (on the title screen) | clear the saved game |
| touch | the on-screen control panel |
A few things worth knowing
Stay in the dark. The lights are the only danger. Wait at the edge of a shadow and watch how they move before you step out.
Do not run all the time. Running costs health, and health comes back slowly. Use it for the short dashes that cannot be done at walking speed.
Start on Reading if you are here for the story. The harder settings are real challenges, and some players will prefer to see the whole tale first and come back for the difficulty later.
Credits and licence
A Lighted Story was made for GitHub Game Off 2015 by Fu Boquan (LastLeaf) and Liu Zhanhong (jetzhliu), with English script by Chossy, illustrations by tongtonggggg and music by LastLeaf. The code is under the MIT licence; the story, pictures and music are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, so anything made from them has to credit the authors and keep that same licence. The Noto Serif font is under the Apache 2.0 licence. The licence texts are linked from this page. This site serves the game without its Chinese font and without the buttons that link to other websites (they do nothing here).