Out Of The Dark: Light Released

Light was one of those immediately interesting games where I glanced at a screenshot and said "yep, need it." It's a top-down 2D stealth-em-up with an absolutely gorgeous aesthetic. Waking up with short-term memory loss, the goal is to discover what has happened to you and who you are, while dodging guards in some sort of facility. Stealth games have always appealed, but doing it in first and third person 3D is always far more frustrating than it should be. Presenting line of sight and positioning information more clearly will be a real boon. You can grab it on Steam now and there's a trailer if you can sneak past me t- hey, where'd you go? Hello?

We've actually posted about this before, in October last year, when developer Just a Pixel took to Kickstarter but had a rocky time of it. During the campaign, Team 17 approached them and offered to publish the game, which gave them the money to hire a musician and polish it up. Previously they've worked on Flipper, a simple puzzle game, as well as some mobile applications.

If you'd like to try it first, you can still grab the prototype demo from last year here, though how much resemblance it has to the full game now is debatable. After a quick play, it has a Hotline Miami vibe, both in how detached I felt from the actions I was carrying out and the level-learning nature. It's clearly a prototype: I managed to hide from two guards by sitting behind the dead body of a third. Guess they thought Charles had just passed out standing up in the corner again, silly sod. The feel is all there though, with a threatening atmosphere and clear necessity to staying in the dark, carried along by a weird, disjointed soundtrack.

What has switched up is the setting. The plot of the demo, what little there is, definitely suggests the player as the aggressor. The implication is a solo bank robbery, from the line of desks in the first room. The main game has replaced that with a corporation that has mysteriously altered your memory, which to me is a missed opportunity. I've already got quite enough being kept down by THE MAN going on in my real life and all my other games, robbing a bank or two would be healthy.

Not that any of that puts me off from playing it. It still looks absolutely gorgeous and the demo confirmed the game is there to support its art style. It's 30% off during launch week, if you're feeling similar.