I've been trying to go through some of my backlog of games on both the PC and PS5, and recently played through a retro, lo-fi indie horror game called No One Lives Under the Lighthouse. I'm not quire sure what to make of it, and have very mixed feelings. In essence, the first half of the game is excellent. It perfectly evokes the loneliness and sense of isolation of being a lighthouse keeper, and both the lighthouse and the island it sits on are incredibly atmospheric. The back half of the game, however, kind of went off the rails for me. It jumps around a lot, the imagery becomes exceedingly abstract and difficult to parse, and it was just overall confusing. Honestly, I kind of wasn't even sure if I was playing as the new lighthouse keeper, or if the game had flashed me back to the past to play as the previous lighthouse keeper who had gone missing. That's right, the game was so confusing that I wasn't even sure which character I was playing as!
It doesn't help that the dialogue and narration is completely text-based, and that text is too small, and the font is too elaborately-decorated in an Old English style. So I may have mis-read some of the text that might have explained what is going on. There's no options to change the size of the text or use a more plain type-face either.
The premise is to maintain a lighthouse after the former keeper disappeared.
The basic premise is that a lighthouse keeper goes missing under mysterious circumstances, with no body being found. A new keeper comes to the island to take over that missing keeper's duties, and the nature of the previous keeper's disappearance is gradually revealed. Or at least, it's supposed to be revealed, but I honestly couldn't follow along with what was happening.
After the prologue, it is assumed that I'm playing as the replacement keeper. But later in the game, it starts to be implied that either I've switched to playing as the previous keeper in the past, or that I was playing as the previous keeper all along. There might also be a third lighthouse keeper, who was the original keeper before the one who disappears in the prologue? I don't know.
It's hard for me to say with any degree of certainty whether my inability to follow along was entirely on me, or if the game genuinely does a poor job of explaining what is happening. I don't know anybody else who's played this game, so I didn't have anybody to talk to about it. And it's small, indie nature means there aren't very many other reviews of it either. Supposedly, there's a "Director's Cut" of the game in which the entire second half was remade. I'm pretty confident that the version that I played on PS5 is that modified Director's Cut, in which case, I can't imagine how bad and confusing the original ending might have been.
It doesn't help that the retro, lo-fi, PS1-inspired graphics make it really difficult to make out what I'm looking at. Is this a normal hunk of meat hanging on this meat hook? Or some kind of alien biomass? Or is it a person? I honestly can't tell. There's a time and place for retro graphics, and the visuals do help with the atmosphere at times, but in my opinion, at the times when it really mattered, the lo-fi graphics were more of a hinderance than a feature.
Can the character stay sane in this lonely and isolated environment?
I think this game is deliberately trying to evoke the "what the hell is that?!" element of the original Silent Hill on the PS1. But at least in Silent Hill, the visuals are clear enough for you to know that you're looking at a zombi-fied corpse locked in a metal cage. The player might not be able to tell whether it's a person, or a monster, or something else, and your imagination gets to fill in the blanks. But you still have a general idea of what you're seeing. In No One Lives Under The Lighthouse, I sometimes can't even begin to guess what I'm looking at.
Heck, the main menu makes the Silent Hill inspiration seem super obvious, as the music sounds like it was pulled straight from the original Silent Hill's soundtrack. This game's main menu music sounds similar to Silent Hill tracks like quot;For All" and "Never Again". It's a great piece of horror music that really sets the mood and got me excited to play. The rest of the music and sound design also hits a great sweet spot that feels like a combination of Silent Hill and Amnesia. Sometimes, it's hard to tell if the sounds I'm hearing are part of the ambient background music, or if it's the low groans of a monster hiding just out of sight, and it does a great job of keeping the player on edge.
And that is the kind of stuff that really makes the first half of the game feel like an exceptionally atmospheric horror title. The opening hour or 2 of the game consists largely of the player performing the mundane (and possibly tedious) tasks of operating and maintaining the lighthouse. You have to light the lamp and turn the crank to get the mirrors spinning. You have to clean your house and clean the lens of the lighthouse. You have to fix things that break. But the game is very upfront about the fact that there is something supernatural going on, and that you're going to have to work against that supernatural threat in order to keep the lighthouse functioning.
The player must keep the light fueled, and keep it clean.
Or are you just going mad from the loneliness and isolation?
But despite modeling all these mundane and tedious tasks, the act of actually doing them isn't tedious. The repairs are framed as puzzles, and are constantly escalating, and you never have to do the same repair twice. Every day, it's some new problem to deal with, and the changing weather effects like rain and fog, and transitions from day to night, also help to keep the visuals and mood from getting too stale or repetitive as well.
There's a constantly escalating sense of danger, dread, and mystery. Am I going mad? Is it just bad weather damaging the lighthouse, and bugs getting into the mechanisms? Or is there something out there trying to get me? And as someone who does suffer from lepidopterophobia, there are a couple scenes in this game that were particularly affecting for me.
If the ending of No One Lives Under the Lighthouse clicks with you better than it clicked for me, then it might be one of the best indie horror games that you'll play. But for me, it's definitely a game of 2 halves. I was totally on board for the first 2 hours, only for it to completely loose me in the final 2 hours. As such, I can't help but wish that the slow-burn opening of the game had gone on a bit longer, maybe with a few more days of escalating lighthouse maintenance and strange, supernatural occurrences. That way, I'd have walked away with a positive impression of most of the game.
In any case, it's pretty cheap. Only $7 on Steam (but the console versions are almost twice as expensive for some reason?), and you can probably get it even cheaper if you wait for a sale. So if you're in the mood for an atmospheric retro horror experience, then you'll at least get 2 solid hours of exactly that.
The opening hour or 2 might be worth the price.