Deadlight is a sidescrolling puzzle platformer with survival horror themes, developed by Tequila Works. The game features cinematic direction with comic book cutscenes, and 2.5D gameplay. I played the Director's Cut version of the game on PC, and below is my review of the game's main campaign.
The Story of a Survivor
The game's events follow the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in 1986. The plot follows Randall Wayne as he traverses through Seattle after separating from the group that he has joined. Knowing their destination, Seattle's Safe Zone, he sets out to meet with his group there, and maybe his family.
Zombies in this game are called Shadows. The game doesn't explain how they came to be, and if there's ever a solution to them. They're mostly treated as a force of nature. And of course, the living are more dangerous than the dead!
While not technically impressive, the graphical design of this game is solid. The game uses color contrast to its advantage with characters being darker than the grey-ish brown background. Lighting's colors keep changing according to the mood of the cutscene. Something I didn't expect of such a low-budget game.
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The game is structured into 3 chapters with cutscenes dividing different segments of them. These cutscenes are presented in comic book-styled still images with voice-over. I thought these cutscenes were a creative way to cut the costs of the game's development, and they look very cool!
Puzzles and Zombies
Deadlight's gameplay loop consists of finding ways to traverse the city while avoiding shadows, traps, and hazards. As a side-scroller, most of the game is spent moving from left to right. Jumping between ledges, and solving environmental puzzles. It's a well-designed game. Interactable objects are marked, traps can be avoided first-time, and puzzles have intuitive solutions.
The game features combat, but it's minimal. Bullets are limited, and melee weapons cost a lot of stamina. You have to avoid shadows while you can.
The game saves very often. Checkpoints are always a couple of minutes between each other. If you die, (and if you're like me, you'll die A LOT,) you'll restart from a couple of rooms away. However, there were times, I had to replay longer parts of the game because of story reasons. Generally, the less obvious a trap is, the closer to it you restart from.
The death 'Game Over' screen is painted a beautiful shade of red. Seeing its beauty reduces my frustration of losing.
Easy to Control, Frustrating at Times
Deadlight uses simple controls. One button for jumping. One button for interacting with the environment objects. One button to attack. The shooting mechanic wasn't very conventional, which made it hard for me to adjust to. Aiming is done via joysticks while RT is used to shoot. I kept pressing RT for aiming, and dying because it didn't happen.
While most of the game controls very responsively, I found myself frustrated when I hung on hedges, and my character refused to jump. It wastes a couple of seconds every time, and in one chapter caused me to die several times, as my character didn't jump quickly enough.
Still, it may be just me, so I won't be hard on the game.
Hero? ...An Ordinary Man
As you traverse through Seattle, more of Randall Wayne's backstory is revealed. He finds more people of his group along the way, but he doesn't find his family which gets him more, and more worried. He hopes they are in the Safe Zone, but where's even that place?
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At any time during the game, you can view Randall's diary from the menu. Some pages are torn, but you find some of these torn pages scattered through Seattle. You get to see how broken this man is, and makes his dialogue in the game more sad. The diary helped me connect a bit with Randalls group of friends, because during the main story they... Let's just say, they're ill-fated.
The foreshadowing of this game is masterful. Many hints are dropped before the two twists of the game are revealed, and I figured out both of them as I played. Some parts of the game felt like filler, but even these parts had some hints about the nature of the game's world.
By the end of the game, I felt satisfied with the plot. If a bit sad, but for a horror game/story, that's expected!
Deadlight Director's Cut
The game took me 5 hours to finish, including the time spent repeatedly dying, so I'm sure I can finish Deadlight: Director's Cut in less than half the time if I play it again.
The game has multiple other modes, but I only played the main story. Even with just that, I recommend this game, especially on a sale! If you're interested in the other modes of the game, please watch/read other reviews.
For now, I hope you have a nice day, and see you in another article.
My Impressions Threadcast
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Thanks for Reading.~