The mighty mite of meandering muses on melancholy moods ~

Lloyd Sabin, 23 April 2018

Sometimes games just click with us. There’s no break-in period, no giving the game “a chance,” no mucking around…we love it right away.

That was how it worked with me and Deadlight, a side-scrolling, zombie-killing, puzzle-solving adventure game built in the Unreal engine by Tequila Works. Most players clocked in game length at around 5 hours…I got very close to the end between 5 and 10 hours, and then got stuck on one part where the acrobatics involved were just too much for my slowing hands.

Up until that point, though, the game was great. I loved the story, I loved the setting (Seattle and the surrounding area circa the mid 1980s) and I loved the gunplay and survival components. Players get s small variety of weapons to use including a shotgun, pistol, and ax.

The mood created by all of these facets combined was palpable…the player really does develop a sense of hopelessness, which slowly recedes the better the player gets at the game’s mechanics, which can get a bit complicated.

Certain obstacles and levels also featured the developer’s sense of humor, especially when you come across them the first time and get slaughtered…left to think ‘how the hell am I supposed to beat that?’ It also didn’t hurt that the game is now roughly six years old and I picked it up for a dollar. Literally. So I easily got my money’s worth x 25, at least, even though I didn’t quite finish the game completely.

As you can see below, Deadlight is one of those games whose visuals speak for themselves. So this week I don’t really think captions for each shot are necessary, which will allow me to show off more shots than usual! Plus I’m feeling pretty lazy today. Enjoy the below and if you can pick up Deadlight for 1, 5, 10 or even 15 dollars, it’s definitely worth it if you enjoy platformers, zombies, survival games, moody lighting and the original Pitfall game by Activision…with an edge.

That shot above is the beginning of the sequence that shut me down. I must have went through it 50 times but other than a tiny incremental advance, I could not get completely though and got killed every single time.

So I put Deadlight aside probably an hour before I completed it. Such is gaming life. I had enough fun to come back to it eventually, maybe even replay the whole thing.

See you next week!

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