The obvious way of bundling up Beautiful Light is probably “Hunt Showdown meets S.T.A.L.K.E.R.”, and whoops, I’ve already committed to that in the headline. But the first game that came to mind when I chanced on some playtest footage last night was The Town Of Light, LKA’s deeply disquieting game about exploring a carefully recreated abandoned asylum.
There’s the title overlap, of course – it’s always a bit of a provocation when horror games make a point of being well-lit. Beyond that, the two games share an interest in dessicated interiors where chairs huddle disconsolately, where the sun slides through windows whose curtains have rotted away, and the plaster flakes in ways both pretty and macabre. But where The Town Of Light gave you one rambling building’s worth of encroaching hallucinations, Beautiful Light gives you a whole wilderness, where the architecture scales from “dreary forgotten school” to “gleaming underground base”. It also gives you a lot of guns. Devised by Geneva-based Deep Worlds SA, this is a team extraction shooter where six squads of three gasmasked alpha-bravos compete to retrieve an artifact from a quarantine zone full of deadly anomalies.