The 2012 “Summer of Arcade” has been an interesting mix so far. We’ve had a remake of the most beloved skateboarding simulation games of all time, a good kinect game that lets you smash up castles, and now we have Deadlight, a game that combines puzzle platforming with survival horror.

Deadlight is the first game by Tequila Works, a Madrid based development team. The game follows the exploits of Randy Wayne, a former cop who is out looking for his friends and his missing family in a zombie-strewn Seattle in an alternate 1986 where the Cuban missle crises went a different way. Over the course of his adventure, he must survive attacks by “Shadows,” what the survivors call zombies, crazed urvivors, and a paramilitary group called “The New Law” who has taken over Seattle. To survive, Randy must make use of his Parqour skills to dodge threats and his wits to solve puzzles.

All right, let’s get this out of the way: Deadlight’s plot is cliché at the best of times and ultimately only serves to move Randy from place to place. If you’ve watched any zombie movies or played any games in the last ten years that had zombies as antagonists, you can probably see every plot development and twist coming from miles away. This wouldn’t be so bad but the writing also fails to make any of the characters sympathetic or interesting. Randy is the stereotypical man searching for his family with his actual emotions only amounting to him continuously repeating that he needs to find his family. The other characters just stay around long enough to give Randy a clue where to go, with the exception of “The Rat” a character who completely halts the otherwise fast-paced plot so the developers have an excuse to put death traps in the game. While the plot is certainly not going to ruin the game, it definitely doesn’t help make it memorable.

Brains? Nah, none of those today. How about some bullets?

Luckily, the gameplay fares much better and is Deadlight’s greatest strength. While it is a bit odd to see elements of free running in a survival horror game, it works surprisingly well and actually helps build some tension. Randy is a surprisingly spry grizzled survivor and moves just as well as if he was staring in a Prince of Persiagame. However, to make his abilities fit in with the survival genre, he’s given a limited amount of stamina that will quickly drain if he spends too much time running around or hanging on to ledges. At the same time, while you do have a health bar, it doesn’t regenerate and getting swarmed by a crowd of zombies or getting shot is pretty much a death sentence. Also, while there are a few powerups that extend your health and stamina bars, collecting all of them will still only let you survive for a couple more blows if you make a mistake. This makes you have to move quickly and carefully plan each of your moves. This makes your encounters with Shadows, while not scary, tense and keeps Randy’s abilities grounded.

This also allows the game to challenge players to use their brains outside of the puzzles segments (which usually just involve hitting switches and moving boxes). For example, one skill you have early on is the ability to taunt enemies, which will get them to chase after you and can be used to get them to leave an area or fall into a death trap (such as running into an electrified area or getting them to fall to their death). A lot of the time, this ability is actually optional and gives you some choice: sure, you can try to mow down a crowd of zombies and hope they don’t overwhelm you, or you can taunt them, leap out a window, grab onto a ledge, and watch as they fall past you.

Taunting zombies is always fun.

Speaking of the gunplay though, this brings up one problem where the game fails to live up to the survival horror genre, namely, there are too many bullets. While the combat is very tense when you only have a fireman’s axe, due to Randy’s limited stamina, the moment you get a gun, the game becomes a lot easier. The controls are perfect and getting a headshot is as easy as pushing the right thumbstick towards a zombie. This means that you’ll never waste a shot and, with the plentiful amounts of ammo around, your only chance of being caught unaware is if you forget to reload. The reason this is a detriment is that it destroys whatever tension the game has, and ruins the ‘survival’ aspect of Deadlight. I think the best example of this was in the third act when I wasted a crowd of zombies and still had 12 bullets to spare. I saw an optional path and, after conquering a tricky platforming section, was rewarded with six bullets. In another survival horror game, this would have been worth the effort as the bullets would let me survive longer against enemies…in this case however, it felt like a slap in the face since I found a corpse just a screen over that allowed me to collect another dozen bullets. Combined with a few questionable control choices (such as pressing the melee button to drop down from a ledge or making it so you have to be sprinting before you can roll) and annoying chase segment where ladders are added to obstacles you can normally jump over to slow you down, and there can be some moments where the game’s immersion is broken.

However, on the whole, the gameplay is solid. Earlier, I mentioned that the segment with the Rat is terrible from a plot standpoint but it also allows for some tricky but rewarding action-puzzle segments. The game also makes gathering collectibles a cinch; any time you collect an item it is automatically added to your collection, even if you die before hitting the next checkpoint. The collectibles include journal pages and ids from corpses; little baubles that help set the mood. One of the more amusing things you can collect are LCD games, one per level, that are Game and Watch parodies of modern games like Guitar Hero. While they do break the immersion, these games are surprisingly fun to mess around with. So overall, Deadlight’s gameplay is solid and, at times, quite rewarding.

Scenes like this are rather striking.

Deadlight also makes good use of its presentation. While deserted cityscapes have become a dime-a-dozen, Tequila Works was able to create a few striking set pieces, including a deserted hospital and hotel. These two places along with a number of other locations throughout Seattle keep things from getting stale. These set pieces also look great, with graphics comparable to higher- budget productions. There are also a couple of times where the 3D world aswpect is played with by having characters in both the foreground and background in addition to the plane Randy exists in. Yet another feature where Tequila Works really shows off its artistry is during the comic book-styled cutscenes which have art by Abel Oroz, whose style perfectly captures the brutality and tension each scene needs, even when the writing fails to help the situation. Finally, Randy’s flashbacks make a wonderful contrast to the normal Seattle landscape with careful use of lighting and some inspired art direction. It’s clear that Tequila put a lot of effort into its art direction and it comes off well.

However, Deadlight suffers from one giant problem that will kill the experience for many gamers: its short length. After playing through the game, I had found 89% of all collectibles and beaten the game in two and-a-half hours, a nice chunk of which was just from me letting the game run while I took a phone call. While the game wasn’t counting all of my mess-ups, those would have only added another half hour. While there can be some replay from finding all of the collectibles, this will only add an hour at most since, without a guide you’ll have to stumble around entire acts to find everything, acts that aren’t interesting enough to pull you in after one playthrough. A speedrun of the game could easily cut things down to an hour; the game is certainly not the 6 hours that was promised by Tequila Works and has a low pay/play ratio of $6 an hour (at least in my case). While there are certainly worse ratios, there are better ones, especially on Xbox Live Arcade.

Randy tries to convince a gamer that $15 isn't a bad deal.

In the end, you have to ask yourself, “Is two and-a-half hours of a solid game worth fifteen bucks?” The game does have its charm and I would love to see the gameplay expanded upon but Deadlight ultimately fails to provide a reason to revisit its version of Seattle. The plot goes through the motions of an average zombie narrative while failing to have the emotional punch or memorable characters that endear audiences to those stories and there is very little replay once the game is completed. However, if you are the sort of person who doesn’t mind a low pay/play ratio, or a huge zombie fan, you will find an enjoyable, if brief, bit of gaming.

A review code was provided by the game’s publisher for review purposes and played to completion in 2.5 hours. The title is an Xbox Live Arcade Exclusive.

Deadlight Review

By Gabriel B.

It's beautiful, it's fun, it's shorter than a depowered Mario, it's Deadlight!