Sunlight Review: A Slow and Spellbinding Trip

Imagine yourself on the forest floor, eyeing a bud that pokes up through the brush. The forest is dark, but a ray of sun needles its way through the canopy to wash the bud in light. For a moment, all is still. Then the bud begins to grow. It stretches upward and outward, becoming a full tree, becoming itself, and then, with a voice both old and familiar, it asks you: If your child were born sightless, how would you describe the light of the sun?

So begins Sunlight, the spellbinding new game from Norwegian studio Krillbite. Once the tree is fully grown, the player is allowed to explore the surrounding forest at a leisurely walk. The trees, rendered in painterly detail, sway in a gentle breeze. The sun filters in and covers everything with gold. Sunlight's beauty is hard to overstate — it feels almost amniotic, a safe and liminal space. Beneath it all hums a lush performance of Tchaikovsky's "Hymn of the Cherubim" recorded specifically for Sunlight (and utterly beautiful). This game wants you to relax, and it would be a shock if it failed.

The player wanders, and as she does, the original tree's narration finds company. Each spruce and pine in this forest has its own voice, across gender lines and national borders (though they all speak English), and each tells the same story. It feels like an incantation.

Every so often the story halts, the sunlight fades to dusk, and the player must pick a flower from the forest floor for her ever-growing bouquet. Once she does, the day returns and the story picks up where she left it.

The trees speak as though they were human, telling the story of a moment when, as a child, they experienced a profound alienation from themselves and their surroundings. They lost control of their own body, and dissociated such that they failed to recognize other people as human-like them. The story, spoken in halting unison, can unnerve at first, especially as the player will never find another human.

But the truth is, the player isn't alone. Not really, anyway. She's surrounded by these trees, and they become comforting companions. Through the alchemy of art, that initial unnerving quality adds depth to the companionship. The trees come to represent the interconnectivity among people, the shared humanity that makes life worth living. In the words of the narration, any separation between the self and world is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

You should know what you're getting into here. Sunlight is only 30 minutes long. There is no action beyond walking, picking flowers, listening, and once, at the game's end, leaving a message on a tree stump. You can't even sprint, a mechanic that feels sacrosanct in modern first-person games. But Sunlight forgoes those trappings to get at something deeper than the power trip sold by most of its competitors in the medium.

So how would you describe sunlight to the blind? The narrator's answer is perhaps the best, and serves as a summation of the game's all-too-brief runtime.

"I think I'd play them this piece of music," the narrator intones, and Tchaikovsky's voices swell beneath them.

It may be impossible to describe sunlight to the blind. If that gap could not be crossed, the world would be a lonelier place. But it can be crossed, and art is the bridge.

Sunlight is available now on PC. It is developed and published by Krillbite Studio with assistance from the Norwegian Film Institute. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release code provided by Krillbite Studio.