Last night on my YouTube live, I took a first look at When The Light Dies.
When The Light Dies is a new action-roguelike game for PC with strong survival elements from Electric Monkeys and Secret Level Studios. After six months in Early Access, the game got its 1.0 release last month.
The devs sent me a free review copy of the game, so I livestreamed the game for a couple of hours last night.
At first, I wasn’t too sure how I felt about the game. Initially, it feels like a typical horde shooter — you walk around, enemies come from all directions, you shoot them, they die.
Pretty typical stuff, though that’s where the similarity ends.
Survival elements in When The Light Dies
But in When The Light Dies, health isn’t the only resource you have to worry about:
- There’s no dash, but you can run to move faster. This consumes your Stamina. Stamina only regenerates when you’re standing still.
- Standing in the dark consumes your Sanity, which is also used to activate special abilities. Worse, enemy spawn rates and enemy speed increases as your Sanity reaches zero.
- Standing in the dark also decreases your Temperature gauge. If it gets too low, you start taking constant health damage.
- You can light campfires to restore Temperature and provide a lot of light, but they only last for a little while. Campfires are spread across the map.
- Some waves include a Blizzard. Blizzards suck your Temperature away and deal constant health damage if you aren’t standing next to a campfire.
- You also have a lantern, which doesn’t restore Temperature, but does keep your Sanity from decreasing. You can use the lantern to light your way to the next campfire. You’ve got limited fuel for the lantern, though, so carefully managing when to use it is key to your survival.
All the while, increasing hordes of rats, demon dogs, tentacled monsters, and more are encroaching from the darkness intent on making your character into their next tasty snack.
This means the game has a LOT of moving parts, and if you don’t get good at managing all of them, you’re going to have a hard time.
Here’s a clip of me dying to tentacled horrors in the dark before I figured out how to keep track of all these survival elements:
Juggling these survival elements is where the bulk of the gameplay lies.
Where The Light Dies forces you to break a lot of habits you may be used to from other horde shooter games like Vampire Survivors or Brotato. You can’t just stand your ground and mow down enemies.
Sometimes you’re better off running from a pack of enemies so you can reach your next campfire.
Sometimes you have to take some damage from rats while you try to scavenge a barrel for lantern fuel or a book to restore Sanity.
A scarce selection of upgrades
The upgrade system in Where The Light Dies is nothing new. It’s the same level-up-pick-one-of-three-random-upgrades thing we’ve seen in dozens of other action roguelikes. Most of them are minor upgrades to fire rate, reload speed, max health, or defense.
There are no upgrades to increase Stamina, Sanity, or Temperature or adjust their regeneration rates.
Every couple levels you get a “special” upgrade that does something like add a freeze, burn, or chain lightning effect to your shots, or gives you the ability to siphon some Health or Sanity when you kill an enemy.
Some of these special upgrades are pretty cool, but there’s just one problem: there’s not enough of them! You’ll see the same ones over and over again, and some are better than others, so it limits your ability to try different builds.
Meta-progression in Where The Light Dies
Each wave you complete earns hearts, which you can use after each run to spend on each of three constellations full of upgrades to statistics like max Health, Sanity regeneration, move speed, bullet damage, and more. These boosts are kept between runs, making it easier to push further in the game.
A fourth tree with expensive upgrades lets you make “Pacts,” which seem to have the effect of unlocking powerful active abilities, such as summoning a series of black holes to deal massive damage to enemies across the screen.
You earn a ton of additional hearts from completing achievements like “Beat the first boss 5 times” or “Kill 500 enemies with Curse.” This keeps the game from feeling too grindy — you can sink several points into your constellations at the end of each run.
I’m pretty satisfied with this part of the game, but it’d be nice if the constellations were a little larger and offered some keystone abilities that offered more than straight stat boosts.
8 Playable Characters…Kinda?
Where The Light Dies has eight playable characters, seven of which are unlocked through achievements. Comically, all of the characters are basically the same guy with different mustaches and mutton chops.
…and sadly, that’s really all there is to say about the characters. None of the characters offer any unique abilities, which seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Instead, they just offer minor adjustments to your starting stats. The Marine, for example, has more defense but moves slower. The Engineer has less Health and Sanity, but more Stamina and Stamina regen.
Unfortunately, these stat adjustments are so minor that they practically don’t make any difference, especially after you pick up a few constellation nodes.
In my opinion, the unlockable characters are the game’s biggest weak point. If each character had unique abilities or playstyles, it’d really increase the game’s replayability.
Survival + Darkness = Tense Boss Fights
When the boss of each level spawns, the relatively quiet unsettling music swells to a great bombastic boss fight track. (The volume difference is big enough I had to drop the volume in the game options, but the music itself is fantastic.)
None of the survival elements you’ve been contending with during the level go away — you still have to stay in the light and watch your temperature and chew through hordes of monsters — but now you have a particularly big angry monster trying to melt your face added into the mix.
This really makes the boss fights fun, especially if you haven’t been keeping track of things like your Stamina. Since there’s no dash, if your Stamina is gone, it’s very hard to dodge the boss’ attacks.
To make matters worse, the bosses get more powerful over time. If you end up needing to run away to light a new campfire, you can be in for a world of hurt by the time you get repositioned to fight the boss again.
When The Light Dies has poor accessibility options
I’m a gamer with photosensitive epilepsy, and that means that some games are simply inaccessible for me. Thankfully, more and more games are offering better options to players to improve their game experience.
Unfortunately, Where The Light Dies isn’t one of those game. It offers a very limited selection of accessibility options:
- You can adjust Brightness and Contrast
- You can disable Screen Shake and Shadows
- You can remap controls
And that’s about it.
There are no sliders or toggles to control game elements like damage flash, particle effects, or to disable sound effects like the low-health heart beat.
There is no photosensitivity warning at the beginning of the game, although the game (and almost all action-roguelikes of this type) involve a lot of flashing effects that can be troublesome for gamers with photosensitive health conditions.
Combine a large boss with a fast weapon like the gatling gun and you’ve got a constant strobing damage flash effect and no way to turn it off.
For me, the worst offender was the Pact of Ammutseba ability, which has a strong but brief full screen flashing effect before scattering black holes across the game field to deal damage to enemies.
Thankfully, the ability has a long cooldown, but it’s so powerful you feel like you need to use it against bosses and large packs. That initial flash effect is purely cosmetic, so a toggle to disable it would keep the ability’s functionality while making it easier on players with photosensitivity issues.
Unfortunately, the developers haven’t offered a playable demo, which means a gamer’s only way to find out if this game will be triggering for them is to purchase the game (or watch a longplay video like last night’s livestream.)
That said, I played the game for 2 and half hours straight and it didn’t give me any headaches or other issues that I experience with some other games — but my experience with When The Light Dies doesn’t mean that another gamer with photosensitivity won’t struggle with the game.
The lack of accessibility options mean other players with similar issues may not have options to fix the game so they can enjoy it.
Hopefully the devs will consider implementing some better accessibility features in the future.
Is it worth playing When The Light Dies?
Honestly, yeah.
I enjoyed the game despite its flaws.
The survival elements really liven up a genre that has become stale over time, and the game nails the desperate environment it’s trying to convey.
The pixel art, the atmospheric effects, and the music all tie together beautifully to convey the sense that you are absolutely alone in a very hostile environment.
Weak game design spots like a poor choice of upgrades and lackluster playable characters can (and hopefully will) be shored up in future updates.
I don’t think Where The Light Dies is going to be one of those games that’s going to eat up a ton of my time, but for the price point, it’s a great way to spend a few hours.
I give it 3/5 stars overall. ⭐⭐⭐
- Graphics: 5/5
- Music: 5/5
- Gameplay: 4/5
- Replayability: 2/5
- Accessibility: 1/5
Where to get When The Light Dies
You can pick up When The Light Dies on Steam. Sadly, there’s no playable demo, but the game is just $5, which is well worth it for what the game provides.
I do expect we’ll see this one end up in some bundles soon, though, so you may want to hold off for Fanatical or Humble Bundle to get their hands on it.
Get it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2185990/When_the_Light_Dies/
The devs are planning to release the game for Nintendo Switch and Playstation 5 sometime in first quarter 2025.