Static Dread: The Lighthouse
Rating: 7 out of 10
We are living in a golden age of Lovecraftian horrors set around lighthouses, and Static Dread: The Lighthouse is a wonderful example of that sub-sub-sub genre.
After a worldwide atmospheric phenomenon wipes out most of the world’s electronics, sea travel once again becomes dependent on analog technology and lighthouses. You play as a new lighthouse keeper in charge of guiding ships through a rocky coast set somewhere near New England. Unfortunately, cosmic horrors now patrol the waters and woods outside. Surviving each night with your sanity intact while saving lives at sea is a constant struggle.
The fifth game from indie developer SolarSuit and the first in their Static Dread series, The Lighthouse hit Steam in August ahead of a console release via publisher Games Harbor. While the game breaks little new ground, it’s a remarkable remix of recent gaming horror tropes that should please any fan of the uncanny.
The primary game loop is simple: turn on the lighthouse light, communicate with ships and guide them via map and fax machine, fix any malfunctions, answer the door if someone knocks, and don’t let the darkness overtake you as your sanity frays and splinters. Play is broken down by days, with dawn ending each level.
Of course, things go awry almost immediately. Tuning into radio frequencies sometimes results in overhearing people confronting monsters or loudly losing their minds. Are the people who appear at your door regular Maine weird or Stephen King Maine weird? Within a couple of days, ships will start to fax you grainy photos of sea monsters, malformed fish, and incomprehensible statues. One ship requests help over and over each night, claiming to have never contacted you before. Oh, and a demonic presence asks you to send ships to it as sacrifice.
You could argue that Five Nights At Freddy’s jumpstarted this ongoing laborpunk horror game movement: titles centered around thankless jobs that have to tackle terrifying horrors for a pittance of a paycheck. The Lighthouse combines the thalassophobia of something like Iron Lung with the brain-rotting bureaucratic mechanics of Dead Letter Department. The petty way your apparently omniscient boss fines you for, say, letting someone inside the lighthouse, is a nice touch. Yes, shadows of reality-shattering atrocity haunt your steps but, like, you also need cash to buy food. As all of us stumble through late-stage capitalism, the line between games like this and real life get as blurry as the screen when your sanity meter starts to dip.
The game is rarely outright hard. A good horror title knows how to balance the threat of monsters with the frustration of failure, and The Lighthouse is more about vibes than challenge. Tension in the early game comes from your decisions, not necessarily how you fight the evil that occasionally appears. The atmosphere is so lovingly done that it still feels impactful, perfectly balancing horror and play in a way that doesn’t grow stale over the short run time.
There are a few moments when it seems a little too beholden to its inspirations. In addition to the obvious Lovecraft references, the game goes out of its way to tell you it probably takes place in the same universe as Dredge multiple times. The tongue in cheekiness of it gets a little annoying after awhile. Horror needs to be restrained when it comes to self-reference. Too much of it breaks the illusion.
Where The Lighthouse shines, though, is in its white-knuckle dedication to making you keep working even when things fall apart. From your family radioing you about running out of medicine to helping your supply courier find a reason to keep going, it’s a potent mix of banal and otherworldly. Grounding the cosmic on the back of simple economic survival has produced some fantastic games over the last decade, and The Lighthouse is definitely one of them.
Static Dread: The Lighthouse is now available on PC, XBox, and PlayStation. $12.99
The post Casual Gamer Reviews: Static Dread: The Lighthouse appeared first on Houston Press.
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