Colina: Legacy Review

*Contains Spoilers*

Attractive But Disorganized

Colina: Legacy follows the story of Alex, a young man with a complicated childhood. He wakes alone in his grandmother’s home, and from there tries to piece together his past. In the process, however, he unearths some dark family secrets that were better off lost.
It sounds like an interesting concept for a game, right? In truth, that is where the game officially lost me.

Colina has a little bit of everything. There’s family drama, magical powers, dark creatures, puppets, and a strange cult, but the game makes little effort to tie all of these things together in a way that makes sense. What we are presented with is a game that ultimately cannot decide what it wants to be, and it is a shame considering I enjoyed everything else about it.

One of the things that first pulled me into playing Colina: Legacy was the attractive graphics. The character design is well done and the enemies you encounter throughout the game are sufficiently spooky. The environment is also nice to look at, though there’s not much of it, considering the game really only takes place in three major areas - the house, several winding garden paths, and an underground cult lair. 

The sound design was nice, though the voice acting had a rigidity that I found distracting at times. Breaking a seal with my glyph light was satisfying both to the eyes and the ears.

Alex’s interaction with the light and magical glyphs is a cool concept that is reminiscent of Alan Wake, and I enjoyed being able to reveal hidden messages on the walls or dissolving an enemy with a beam of light. However, I needed more context as to why these glyphs exist or why Alex was so proficient at using them. Was it a family trait? Dumb luck? I never felt as though I understood the origin of the glyphs, their relationship to the world around me, and why Alex was so adept at using them without fully understanding them himself.

The final boss fight was disappointing in a few ways. First, Alex was transported via a gate to a different plane of existence without much explanation. Second, the creature, while interesting, felt incredibly out of place. When I finally defeated it, the game congratulated me on “banishing the child of light” but I had no idea what the “child of light” supposedly was or why I had to banish it. The game presented me with so many “Why am I doing this?” moments and with each one, I became more frustrated. 

Overall, what this game suffers from is poor writing. I enjoyed the visuals and sound design, but the disjointed storyline kept the game from feeling like a coherent adventure. This is a title I cannot recommend, but for the $5 price tag on Steam, it won’t hurt your wallet too much to try. 

[Lady played Colina: Legacy on PC with a mouse and keyboard]