Explore the mysterious island of Geos and meet the colorful characters that are the Tree Constructs! Lili: Child of Geos is an adventure RPG made by the small indie developer BitMonster. Inspired by retro games like Zelda, Lili tries to capture the nostalgia of the past with its beautiful environments and classic adventure mechanics. The game also has strange and zany dialogue that give characters a lot of personality. However, Lili: Child of Geos is a goofy and funny mess that ends up making a few mistakes when it comes to accessibility.
Originally, Lili was a mobile game and it plays like it. Movement is limited and gameplay is simple. You’ll mostly be searching for flowers and chasing spirits, which initiate short quick time events. There are three difficulty modes to choose from and each one really just affects how hard the quick time events are when encountering spirits. Occasionally you’ll do fetch quests that just involve exploration and talking to different characters. Lili: Child of Geos was basically unplayable for me when I tried the PC version. Usually, games tend to be more accessible on the PC, but not this time around. The game had no customizable controls for the keyboard or the mouse. The controls are fixed completely on the PC, no leeway for controlling the camera or remapping keyboard keys. Unfortunately, the developers also made sure to keep gamers from altering the game’s resolution in any way. So I wasn’t able to load the game in windowed mode in order to use the on-screen keyboard. Thankfully, Lili was eventually ported to the PlayStation 4 and I was finally able to really play the game for the first time. Lili: Child of Geos plays a lot better with a controller, I think because there was more care put into reworking the controls to match both analog sticks. Though even on the PS4 there aren’t any customizable controls and disabled gamers with fine motor skill impairments may have trouble with the quick time events in the game. Visually speaking Lili is very bright and vibrant; the environments not the character you play as (although she is too). I didn’t notice any color distinguishing items, so colorblind players shouldn’t worry. For disabled gamers with hearing impairments, Lili has subtitles for every line of dialogue. The soundtrack is fun and upbeat, but not important to the story or the experience.
I’m going to say that overall this game is a poor execution of a nice concept. Classic adventure game aesthetic and gorgeous environments, but the controls are not implemented well and I honestly couldn’t tell whether dialogue in this game was written to be intentionally awkward or not. Lili: Child of Geos definitely goes in that “so bad it’s good” category for me just because I did end up having a lot of fun with its weirdness. However, I have to recommend playing the PlayStation 4 version because disabled gamers with fine motor skill impairments are going to have a hard time with its lack of accessibility.
This article has been transferred from DAGERSystem (now AbilityPoints). Scores, formatting, and writing style may differ from original CIPT content.
