htoL#NiQ Firefly Diary

Kind of cute, kind of morbid, and kind of hard. 

By Urian Brown March 11, 2015

The strangely titled htoL#NiQ (a corrupted transcription of "Hotaru no Nikki," a.k.a. The Firefly Diary) is an action-puzzle game by Nippon Ichi Software, makers of Disgaea. In htoL#NiQ, you play as Lumen and Umbra, fireflies who help guide an amnesiac girl named Mion out of a dark labyrinth with the power of light and shadow.

Mion is helpless, so it's up to you to control either Lumen or Umbra to lead Mion to her destination unscathed. Since she can't fight, your firefly has to interact with switches and other things around Mion's environment so she can survive and move on. You control the fireflies with the Vita's front and rear touch screens. The front screen is used for controlling Lumen, who interacts with the real world, while the back screen is used to control Umbra, who maneuvers within the shadows. It's kind of a pain to control the game exclusively with touch controls, but thankfully there's a way to change it to button controls in the options. Throughout the game, collecting memory fragments (shaped like roots) will play some pixelated flashback scenes although they can be easy to miss when making your first playthrough. You can revisit older levels if you want to collect them all, though.

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Aesthetically, htoL#NiQ is a lot like Limbo, another title where you control a small child who has to survive through a dark and dangerous land. And like Limbo, htoL#NiQ feels like an indie game although it's actually published by a large and well-known Japanese developer. Gameplay, however, reminds me of Lemmings in a way, since you have to help a protagonist you can't directly control to their goal. It's a neat little experiment, but it's also short and sometimes frustrating.

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htoL#NiQ – The Firefly Diary – is one of the stranger games I've played and has a Western indie game vibe to it, especially with the creepy visuals and the short length. The touch controls hurt this game, in my opinion, despite the developers' intentions by giving the player an original experience.

Hint: If the touch controls bother you, like me, then just change them to the C configuration in the options menu. It makes the experience a lot less stressful.

by Ray n.