If Deadlight has any one thing going for it, I?d say it has to be its ability to deliver on the concept of a 2D horror game. And in saying that I don?t think that Deadlight is a bad game by any means, in fact, it?s a pretty well put together piece of interactive horror, that takes a fairly tired concept (zombies) and puts a unique spin on it. You?re not mowing down hordes of undead Left 4 Dead style, and you?re not bashing them over with head with shopping carts and construction cones like Frank West from Dead Rising. Deadlight?s pace is more deliberate, more thought out, and frankly more visually arresting than most games that use zombies as the big bad.
You?re put in control of the lead character, Randall Wayne, a father and husband at the end of his rope, stuck in a post-apocalyptic world with a small group of survivors hoping to find his daughter and wife in the middle of all this mess. He?s traversed through his home of Canada to arrive in the Seattle, Washington area, in the hopes of finding a safe zone advertised as a gathering place for any survivors. The world around him is a literal war zone, littered with corpses both inanimate and walking. It?s not just the zombies that have caused the destruction, but the human race has apparently done a pretty fine job of bombing the hell out of itself in an effort to contain whatever the plague is.
For the most part, Randall is stuck navigating his world with only his feet and hands to help him get along. While you occasionally need to go toe to toe with the undead, dubbed Shadows here, you?ll usually do your best to avoid contact with them. Sometimes this means jumping over or around them, or sprinting through a section where they?ll pour into the foreground from the background, which is a really effective way of making you surrounded and in danger without them become obstacles on the 2D plane.
But this is also where some of Deadlight?s concepts start to fall a little short. The scarcity of ammo, and weapons is general, has their impact lessened by the fact that the game likes to take your weapons away from you a little too much. The tale is divided up into three acts, and roughly at the start of act 2 and 3 you?ll get all your weapons stripped away and you?ll need to regain them. So while ammo might be scarce, you don?t really have control of your guns long enough that running out of ammo is all that dangerous to you in the long run. In fact, I never really had an issue with it, and unless you?re literally unloading shots into the abdomens of Shadows instead of their heads, you probably won?t either. And while I understand from a story perspective the sense in having your weapons taken during Act 3, the part that it occurs at in Act 2 feels really arbitrary and more for the sake of not breaking the game and forcing you to make use of a different mechanic.
Other issues I have with Deadlight are a little more nitpicky, but definitely issues nonetheless. As an older gamer, I tend to play with subtitles on, generally because it?s hard for me to play with the volume at a high level due to the considerations of others within my house. But the implementation of the subtitles in Deadlight is pretty bad, in that they tend to obscure a significant portion of the bottom part of the screen, and will literally obscure your view during some inopportune moments. If I wanted to play with the subtitles on, I literally had to let my character stand still until the text finished before continuing on. This also occurs from some tooltip style prompts, and when you find some of the collectible, optional material. Placing text or icons in a more out of the way section of the screen would have been ideal.
There are also a few sequences in Deadlight that lead to some fairly cheap deaths, and aggravating moments in general. This occurs with a handful of traps in Act 2, which involves an area that has you navigating a few surprises where you?re given less time to react than seems feasible, causing you to restart the section and passing only because you already know what?s coming. This also occurs in the last bits of the game, which will have you running into a couple foes by surprise that are capable of taking you out in one hit, which is only surprising because the game has delivered an expectation to the player that you can generally survive a bit of damage up to this point, but now you can?t. It?s also the first time you go toe to toe with this particular enemy, and you?ll not know what to expect out of the encounter until you?ve been killed.
And to be fair, even if progress was lost, and despite some of the cheap deaths I encountered, Deadlight?s checkpoints are extremely lenient and well-spaced. I was never really stuck for long re-doing any section of the game, and I certainly felt like the experience was more about the overall journey than navigating overly tough bits of platforming or combat. And really, that?s what makes Deadlight stand out to me more, the fact that it takes horror and shoves it into a 2D space, and does a pretty good job of it. Deadlight looks absolutely gorgeous in motion, and I adore every bit of it that involves me ducking through open windows into abandoned motel rooms, houses, warehouses, and just seeing the absolutely wrecked world surrounding it all. It feels and looks like you?d expect a post-apocalyptic world to be, but all within a 2D space, which is unique enough to make Deadlight worth your time.
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