Does It Shine? The Light Kickstarter
Let there be Light?
A few developer chums on Twitter have been tweeting about Light's Kickstarter, decrying its surprising lack of success with the crowd's funds. It's a game that takes aspects of Hitman, Payday, Monaco, and Subversion, so I was agog it hadn't crossed my path (maybe it's just too stealthy?). I discovered a tough little game of sneaking and hacking, wrapped up in a minimalist pants with excellent sound design. But most important of all, I discovered a Kickstarter pitch with a cat.
The demo is early and considered alpha, so it only has a few mechanics to play around with, and it's the basis of the pitch below if you don't have the time to play it.
Stealth is based around vision cones, where you can see where the guards are facing and make a decision on when to move. You can also see their approaching footsteps if you're pushed up against walls and doors that they're patrolling past. Mixed in with the sneaking and coshing is hacking: you take control of parts of the level, unlocking doors to allow you access to higher security areas. Hacking is currently pretty simple, just pressing 'e' and then entering a mode that gives you access to the level's various unlockables. There's not a lot on offer at the moment, with just doors to open, but according to the team things will get a whole lot more complicated.
The missions include (and are not limited to) robbing banks, stealing outfits to successfully infiltrate high security areas, killing targets without being spotted, stealing top-secret information, hijacking the communication points to distract/mislead the guards, threaten and extract information about the location of your targets and planting evidence.
I did have fun coshing a guard and using his blood trail to lead another guard away from a door, and even if I was just moving a little box around, it was enough to make me want to see more. Pile on some systems, make the levels feel a bit more reactive, and I'll definitely feel like it was a worthwhile pledge. Just use some of my money for cat food.