[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Light - Die to Surive through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Light - Die to Survive Systems: Windows, Linux Release Date: July 31, 2024 Publisher: NoteBuddy, Inc. Developer: NoteBuddy, Inc. Time Spent: 73 Minutes
I have mixed feelings about Light - Die to Survive.
On one hand, I like the concept of a game where you have to be mindful of your surroundings and try to find clues and hints on how to proceed. But then that begs the question of what to do if you don't notice a clue or fail to act? You die. And so then you start again, almost immediately without a "You Died" screen or a "Continue?" screen to give the player the maximum amount of drive to continue playing.
The problem comes in when even the developers acknowledge that the game is designed to be bang your head against the wall level-challenging and equally frustrating and have this as part of a weaponless survival horror-styled game, therein lies the issue. As of this writing, I have not completed the first of three chapters, but from what I've gathered from the Steam and Keymailer pages, the mechanics are all pretty similar. You play as a nameless character who finds themself in a location armed only with a flashlight. You will come across abnormalities within your environment, such as a mannequin in the middle of a darkened forest road, and you have to figure out what to do. Do you shine your light on the mannequin? Do you run past it? Do you walk past it with your flashlight off? The game almost immediately lets you know if you didn't do something correctly because if you pass an invisible line after not completing the specific action, you will be killed and then you start over from the beginning of the stage. You then proceed back through the level, remembering all of the actions you took that allowed you to proceed until you solve all of the puzzles/riddles.
On its own, the survival horror portion of the game is pretty effective. It is very unnerving to come across a mannequin off the side of the road. It can be unsettling seeing a phone booth on the side of the road and only hearing it ring after you've passed it. It can be upsetting to find a mannequin's hand in the middle of an abandoned highway. Similar to the games in the backrooms genre, being somewhere that feels vaguely familiar along with something that is very out of place can be a bit unsettling. Something in the back of your brain is telling you that something isn't quite right with this scenario, and that's when you find yourself on edge. It's a great feeling to have when you're playing a survival-horror game because that's why we play survival-horror games. But then mechanics kick in, and you die because you didn't do something correctly. So you start back at the beginning by your truck with its blinking lights and you run up the road. The screen glitches and you see the mannequin in the same place as before. Then you see the phone booth, same as before. Then you run past the dumpster with your flashlight off, same as before. Then you illuminate the portapotty and run past it, but ignore it when you hear the banging, same as before. You repeat the same actions until you reach something new, and the trial and error experiments start all over again.
And that's the flow of Light - Die to Survive and again, one of the inherent issues with this kind of game. The first time you come across anything out of place, it can be scary, but the ninth time you pass the same mannequin, it's no longer scary, it's just a thing you run past to get to the next six anomalies because it's still unclear what you're supposed to do at the bus stop. The further you get in the game, the longer it takes to get back to where you were to figure out what you're supposed to do. And any real sense of fear that might've been present at the beginning has been replaced by annoyance and frustration. And that's not what this game is supposed to be about.
Every time I have played this game, I've only been able to stomach about 15-20 minutes before I have to put it down. I can only take dying nine times in a span of 19 minutes before I start to get weary of the whole endeavor; yes, I died significantly more and at a faster rate playing Celeste, but that's a completely different game. One nice thing though is that the position and location of objects that appear/disappear will sometimes change, but only after you turn the game off and start it back up again. On one playthrough, a mannequin (there're a lot of mannequins in the forest apparently) might appear in a ditch while the next day, the same mannequin might appear on a hillside. If the game were to have that level of permutations after each death, there might be a stronger sense to replay after the third death because you're not running through the same actions time after time after time.
Which ultimately led me to consider how many times I had actually died throughout all of my playthroughs. In one count, among three videos and 73 minutes, I had died about 18 times, which I admit does not seem like a lot, but a lot of it stems from the "I don't know what I'm supposed to do or look for, and I keep dying in the process." So I decided to take my frustration and turn it into a bit of a joke with the video that I put out last week.
On Friday, we'll take a look at my actual attempts at playing Light - Die to Survive and how the game actually handled on the Steam Deck, now that we have a bit of context on the game itself.
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