Checkpoint Breached: Deadlight: You could have just taken the stairs

I'm taking an aside from the big titles from big production houses to touch on the indie scene this time around.

Deadlight is a, from the wiki, "2.5D sidescrolling survival horror cinematic platformer". Fucking hell that's a lot of adjectives. Personally I would classify it as a "2.5D platforming puzzle game with zombies to make it harder." But either one gives you somewhat of an idea of what the game is about, cept the 2.5D thing, that's a bit odd.

Departing from the game for a minute, I'm going to touch on the indie scene at current. The Indie game scene is a mean and scary beast. Opening up your game to profit also means opening up you game to an unforgiving public. For every Minecraft or Bastion that makes it to the top, there's tons of others that were ripped to shreds along the path to serve as warnings for the climbers coming up behind them. A indie or any game with an unproven dev house or IP must be very careful what it puts out as it's debut album. Make something great, it will get huge amounts of praise and a cult following. Make something bad and you've basically signed your own death warrant.

With that in mind, Tequila Works sits on shaky ground in my opinion.

Deadlight plays kind of oddly. It seems as though it's trying to be too many things at once. On one hand, it wants to be a puzzle game, with jumping and platform puzzles that require you to interact with the environment to solve them. On another hand, it wants to be an action platformer with chase scenes and difficult to navigate sections with time limits. And then it wants to be a zombie survival game with tense sections and limited ammo and finally it wants to be a gritty storytelling device. But the jack of all trades is the master of none.

I really hate this section

The 2.5D thing is hard to get used to. Displaying a 2D running path in a 3D environment is not something gamers have a lot of experience with. There's this constant urge to try to go into the background like in old 2D adventure games. For the first half of the game I kept trying to press up to go through doorways, it just seemed like the logical thing to do. The fully animated backgrounds look very nice, I hardly had to do any set-up for my screen shots like I normally do, the whole game looks like it's made of promo screenshots. But it's tough to get a feel for the depth element. A few times I was shooting at stuff in the background or couldn't see something because of something blocking it in the foreground.

There are literally stairs right there

The controls are a bit odd too. The game was very upset I wasn't playing with a controller and reminded me of this constantly. When a new tutorial window would pop up it would say, "Press X to do this action or if you're one of those damned PC gamers I guess you can push e or something to do this too. Oh, it took you so long to find the keyboard bind you died? Well, should've played on an Xbox then." The X button had a nice big graphic to tell you which button to push so you just had to glance at the message to see which one to push, the key bind was just part of normal text. It's very difficult to read quickly like the game demands of r you and pick out the one letter that's not a part of the sentence. To illustrate this point, go find the single letter in that last sentence I wrote, preferably while you only have 4 seconds to do so.

Aside from it just wishing you played on a controller, the controls feel kind of stange. It doesn't have light or flowing platforming. It has the same sort of feel to it as the first Assassin's Creed climbing style but a little slower. And your character has weird collision boxes. The difference between actually grabbing a ledge and missing it feels a bit off. This is also true of the landings, apparently Randal soled his boots with ice because sliding is something you have to contend with frequently.

Aside from it's problems, the controls are functional but are going to require you to try. Pulling off a successful wall jump is a fickle art form that the game requires you to master. Pulling and pushing boxes also has you hold down the strangest button combination in some cases. You have to hold down "e" to grab the box the push "a" or "d" to move the box. So try that out for a second, put your hand on WASD like you're playing a game and then push down both "e" and "d", it's going to feel odd. But they still work and I usually felt that my skill let me down rather than the game in most of the cases where I died.

The combat is actually pretty nicely done. There's a bit of dissonance about a guy that can climb up entire buildings by jumping from window sill to window sill getting winded after swinging an axe four times in a row but I actually rather liked it. The game actually gives you some choices when it comes to combat. You have the opportunity to shoot all the zombies if you so wish, but you do have limited ammo, you can try to kill them with you axe, you can run, you can try to trick them, you can avoid them, it's nice to see a zombie game that allows you choices. The guns have a nice feel to them, the aiming feels good and solid and the guns feel powerful which they often don't in zombie games. The encounters often felt tense as well, you may jump into a fight with one strategy in mind and have to adapt in the middle as more zombies join the fight from the background. Pulling off your first decapitation 180 headshot combo is really satisfying.

Those zombies could come through at any minute

The story of the game revolves around a one Randal Wayne and is told mostly told through semi-animated graphic novel type panels like the one below.


Would actually make a pretty nice desktop wallpaper

And a word of advice if you ever play this game, TURN ON THE SUBTITLES. The game's voices can be a bit hard to hear and can get drowned out by sound fx and background noise.

See how useful they are?

Story is one area where indie games tend to shine. They don't have too much of a worry of "mass appeal" and can try out some unknown areas of story telling. I kind of liked the cinematics, but I also liked the similar ones from Metal Gear Ac!d so maybe I'm not the best source for that kind of stuff. But the story kind of fell flat for me. You don't start at the beginning of the story, you start "145 after Patient Zero" and start the game by murdering a woman in your group. Apparently this is a bad thing but I only have the game's word for it. Everyone else in the group seems upset by it but it seemed like a pretty logical conclusion at the time.

Randal is not very likeable in the way they try to portray him. He's too gruff and frank. You're supposed to feel sorry for him being separated from his wife and kid but I can't help but feel he'd be much better playing the unstoppable badass he tried to be in the cinematics, that would really draw me in. Then you could have something bad happen in the story to break him, would have sucked me in better. They constantly try to make you feel for characters you just met. A lot of the cinematics would be poignant if the other characters had any part in the story, but they just don't. The game follows a few too many cliches to really hook me in the story.

So in conclusion, the game is fun if this is your style. It has too many focuses and the game is not nearly long enough to make good on all of them. Things are introduced in a rushed manner and it loses focus. There were a number of times were the game really got rolling and flowing only to take you out of it in an instant. The characters are shallow and don't develop at all, it just seems rushed. Still glad I played it though.