Radiolight Review (PC)

Radiolight immediately caught my eye when the trailer dropped in my emails. A darker, creepier take on Firewatch, with an interesting sci-fi mystery? Count me in. Thankfully, the game pays off its premise well, providing a captivating story peppered with mystery that had me hooked until the end.

We play as Ethan Collins, a local PD who is working the case of the missing scout Eliot Laire. Laire went missing a few days prior in the woods near Ashwood Creek, and we join Collins as he is called out to help the search party already out there. One of the rangers – Harvey Waters – has also gone missing, and so we must find Harvey and help him and the others look for Elliot.

From the word go, Radiolight got its hooks in me with some great worldbuilding and set up. Investigating his house and the loud music that starts as we’re settling in, we get to learn about Ethan’s family situation, his newly 18-year-old daughter staying with him for the summer and planning on heading to the very woods that Elliot went missing in. The performances throughout Radiolight are pretty good, with some believably enjoyable acting from the cast helping keep us invested in what is going on.

Once we’re out in the woods, we’ll need to get used to Robert – Ethan’s friend back at the station who we only communicate with over the radio. Robert can be a bit of a dick at times, though he is vital in keeping Ethan sane and heading in the right direction.

Exploring the areas yields lots of optional story details, and even in the first area there is a surprising amount to find. Anything of interest can be picked up and investigated, and most of these can be reported back to Robert, often with a multiple choice dialogue tree. 

As we move through the forest, we’ll be talking and reporting to Robert a lot, be that footprints we find on the ground, an abandoned cabin that isn’t as abandoned as it looks, or other, more bizarre sights and sounds. Again, I enjoyed finding all of the details though and reporting back, oftentimes new nuggets of info providing context for other discoveries. 

When we’re not reporting to him, we’re exploring and solving light puzzles. One early example sees us needing to get into a locked cabin. The key is hidden nearby, although we can just break the window and climb in if we’re in a rush. Don’t go in expecting immersive-sim levels of options, but I did appreciate that for all the puzzles in the game like this there seems to be a level of freedom (another later example has us hunting an item, but this is actually found in multiple spots so as to not have us looking around for ages).

The other key aspect in exploring (other than the map, which does what it says on the tin) is Ethan’s radio. We can tune it to various frequencies, from music stations to local information broadcasts. Eventually, the radio will become more important to the story and goings on, including being used for set combat sections that are not all that enjoyable to play. These are thankfully kept brief and only appear a few times throughout the game, though I wouldn’t have missed them if they were skipped entirely.

I managed to beat Radiolight in one evening, playing across both laptop and ROG Xbox Ally X, taking about 5 hours. The game performed great on the handheld, though due to the dark nature of the setting it was occasionally hard to see what was going on in some areas. 

But no matter where I was playing, I found myself utterly entranced in the goings on of Radiolight. The map is large although mostly linear so I never got lost, and even the couple of times I got myself turned around it was easy enough to figure out where I was supposed to go next to complete the objective. And, without spoiling things, Radiolight ends its story just as strong as the rest of the narrative.

Conclusion

Radiolight is an enjoyable sci-fi adventure where we’re constantly wanting to see what’s next, with great performances pulling us through to a solid conclusion.

This game was tested and reviewed on PC (via Steam). All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by the publisher.