The Light Keeps Us Safe

I love postapocalyptic worlds with scary alien machines so I enjoyed playing it.

The only thing that I find a little disapointing is that the only ending feels like a bad ending.

I diont like it I found it boring.

This is essentially a darker spiritual successor to Big Robot's first game "Sir, you are being hunted".

Visually it's dark and especially the red lights of the enemies stand out against that background. Their sounds are easy to recognize and the game mostly feels quite fair, though a certain slow-moving threat may frustrate some players.

However, stealth is reliable and - on Normal difficulty - the enemies are mostly not too perceptive. The flashlight might not seem like much help or like a particularly interesting tool, but once more modes become unlocked, things become more interesting.

Story-wise it's bare-bones and it shouldn't be played for that reason. This is very much a game that is centered around its gameplay loop which is stealth. This is a game for players who enjoy stealth and atmosphere and don't expect more than a small team can deliver.

In that sense I recommend it.

Keep in mind that while I recommend this game, it's only on sale.
The atmosphere and visual art direction is incredible, the stealth is decent, and the light mechanic is a neat concept.

However, this game still has some major bugs, and is rather poorly designed.
It's not very well communicated where you need to go, what you need to look for, or how different machines are meant to be handled exactly.
You basically are left to learn this yourself. And while the idea of letting the player find the solution isn't bad, what is bad is that we're left with pretty much no idea what we're supposed to do.

Robots are impossible to stealth pass without bottles, you can't choose your upgrades, your flashlight battery is way too weak, even on easy mode, you don't get a map, you can't even save manually.
Signal from Tolva did a much better job with upgrading, collecting, maps, tutorials, saving, and lore.

Oh yeah, the lore is practically non-existent. I only played the first hour or so of it, but it's so light. SFT was also light on narrative, but you'd always get messages for things you'd discover or accomplish. And you'd always find info that would go deeper into the lore of things. You even got a lore book with SFT!
Whereas in TLKUS, there is almost no commentary about what you're doing, why, nor how we got here.
There are books, but they're hard to find, and very light in the writing.
Doesn't help that I heard the ending is very abrupt.

So yeah, this game is NOT worth 20 dollars. But there's a LOT of nice moments you can get our of the experience if you get it on sale, and play it on easy.
I also recommend it to support the devs. I really like this team, with their lovely work on Signal From Tolva, and Sir You Are Being Hunted.
They, much like their games, are far from perfect. But their games are appreciated for their ambition and variety in ideas of open world survival games.

there was potential here. the mechanics are interesting and the enemies and the whole setup but the execution needs some work. the game is pretty straight forward upgrade your handweapon avoid enemies. some subtitles wouldnt be bad. the tutorial isnt needed so much. for starters you collect bits of gear to upgrade your main weapon. 5/10 maybe that because the price is pretty heavy for the result.

I've decided the best way to review this is to go point by point according to how the game markets itself. Spoilers will be blacked out.

-"Fiendish traps and disturbing hostile environments! Discover a grim world of pitfalls, poison, tripwires, booby-traps and hallucinations."

Credit where it's due, there is indeed poison (damaging environmental ground that's just a static obstacle) and some 'booby-traps' that basically are a gullibility test. However, I have only encountered one hallucination and it's a screaming flaming body in a crucifix pose that appears when you approach a map edge with water...every...single...level. It surprises you the first time, but it then becomes 'oh boy, it's the screaming flaming person again'*eyeroll*

-'A dark and disorentating procedurally-generated environment, different for each playthrough!"
I don't want to play through this again. Moreover,the procedural generation puts trees in buildings, populates levels with a boring arrangement of 'loot shacks' that you can memorize in a single playthrough, and most importantly, exploring sometimes isn't even rewarded! The most egregious was a big landmark setpiece unique to that level with a puzzle - an invisible ramp that your flashlight reveals that you must climb up. But when I climbed to the top...there was nothing there! What felt like an exciting discovery was just procedural disappointment

-"A grim sense of existential threat (because we're good at that sort of thing...)"
Not really, no. However there's this enemy that's like this un-deactivatable alien dropship that slooooowly moves to your location. The first time I encountered it, I didn't realize this, and it ended up camping me withing a building I was looting because I was hiding from other enemies.. But a later level, it added this amazing sense of dread bc you see/hear it coming and you end up scurrying to get away to a new location.

-"A tremendous sense of satisfaction in overcoming certain doom. You want that feeling, don't you? It's a good feeling."
If you want that feeling, don't buy this game.

While the game design is solid (for a game where your flashlight serves as a mechanical multi-tool, you aren't forced to waste your battery just to see where you're going with the gamma set correctly), overall it feels unpolished (some bugs and rough spots), uninspired, and unfun. It'll also take you more than 2 hours to complete, my playthrough with several deaths clocking at 3.5 hours.

Well. I quite liked it.

The core gameplay loop is simple -- run, hide, collect -- but works fine for the time you'll probably be playing this game.
It's not awfully long. When you've collected enough Macguffins you can end the game, so I didn't get to see a fair few of the levels. Might replay them later.

Fantastic atmosphere and sound design. Some people are wary of procedural content. I'm glad to report I didn't get a "procedural" feeling from the levels in this game. They were quite coherently put together, and felt like they'd been designed by a level designer.

I would recommend waiting for a slight price drop. I might not have felt I got my money's worth if I'd paid the full price, but overall I had a good time with this game.

I'm a sucker for atmospheric games and this has that in spades, so if that's all you want then go for it, but it doesn't feel like it came out of early access. It just plops you in the main menu with zero fanfare, and continues to give off a very "rickety" feel and a sense of missing features as you play (some ambient music would help at the very least, though the robot sounds are great). I didn't refund because I want to support the devs, they are a creative bunch, and there's some enjoyable sneaking to be had for a while, but I have to thumb this down as the 1.0 launch left me underwhelmed.

Once you die a couple of times to learn the "rules" of how your light gun and the basic robots work, the game is an immersive and entertainingly tense stealth game about resource collection for the first couple of "levels". However, on the third level they introduce a giant space robot that hovers menacingly in the sky and all goes downhill. It cannot be suppressed or defeated like most other hazards, if you get near it at all it will detect and kill you, and no matter how stealthy you're being it always slowly follows after you as though it psychically knows where you are at all times. The game designers did this in Sir You Are Being Hunted too and I hated it just as much then, though at least you could disable the hot air balloon in SYABH. Since there aren't any big interior or underground sections in the levels and later levels make it increasingly difficult to move around quickly, I don't see how a ticking "keep moving or you die" bomb is fun when there's already the hunger mechanic to discourage playing too slowly or cautiously. I was playing on Easy too, I can't imagine how punishing it would be on harder difficulties.

I won't bother talking much about the movement bugs (getting caught on/in ladders, stairs, debris, etc.) or about the annoyingly inconsistent sight/hearing mechanics of the enemies, other reviews have already done a great job highlighting those problems.

The sad part is that at its core this game has the potential to be a fun indie stealth "survival horror lite" game, but given the problems I encountered with it and the way the devs handled their last game of this kind (SYABH) I can't imagine it'll get much better as time goes on.

I can't recommend this game to anyone, as the amount of effort and frustration required to do well in it would be better spent on other stealth / survival horror titles that are better designed and aren't as buggy.

TL;DR: Game starts okay, but buggy movement, unpredictable AI, and artificial time-based difficulty ruin what could have been a fun indie survival game. Do not buy this game unless you like being frustrated, and even then wait until you can get it at half price or better.

I like the concept, the visual appearance and the audio, sad it seems unfinished and unpolished. If you can get it for a -75% deal, you can try if you are into those kind of games. I played for about 4 hours, but didn't rush the game.
There a bugs like others have written that are annoying. You float away through the map on ladders. You have troubles walking on sloped ramps or staircases, you need to bunny hop to get to the top. You cannot use staircases crouched very well. The maps are only interesting near the main roads, if you explore the borders, there is nothing, its dull and empty space. The ending comes super abrupt. There a key binding for things, that are not in the game, which may give a hint that its a rushed ending.

Warning this game is now should be considered Abadonware.

No updates, no patches, total silence, it was abadoned for good.

(Writing this review because I nominated this game for 2019's "Outstanding Visual Style" award)

If you've played Sir You Are Being Hunted, this is basically that without as much humor or inventory management. That might be a con for some people, so let's just get that out of the way right now.

Where this game shines is its visual style. Everything about the atmosphere and the robot design and the sound direction combines to create a sense of dread that never lets up. A big problem with most horror games is that one can eventually get used to all the creepy stuff that its throwing around; to be honest, that didn't happen to me with this one. I always dreaded having to go back out into the environments.

On that basis alone, I'd give it a solid A+. On the whole "it's a simplified version of Sir You Are Being Hunted" front, it's probably more of a B-. Still, good passing grade.

while the game is fun and innovative, it seems to be unfinished. there are several objects in the game which you can just walk through, sometimes things are spawned inside the terrain, and there are key bindings in the game for things that dont exist (green and black light). its alright for a couple of hours on easy mode, but its too buggy to be played seriously on hard. also stairs have to be sprinted at and jumped up because the character gets caught on the individual steps. it would be great if the game had more story and explanation behind what you see in the levels. overall, it was rather disappointing.

As a developer, it’s got to be hard deciding when to bring your game out of Early Access. Once the public sees your unfinished game, they’re going to get all manner of ideas in their head about what constitutes finished to them, personally. The best you can hope for is satisfying a majority of players, but there’s still something of a floor that we can all probably agree on reaching before pushing that 1.0 button. The Light Keeps Us Safe is a moody, atmospheric, and at times terrifying game that honestly seems to have hit that button a little too soon, and it’s a bit of a toss-up whether or not you can overlook the bugs and rough edges for the unique experience it offers.

The world ended again, can ya believe it? This time it was the machines, great, terrible constructs that wander the barren land in search of any humans left un-purged. There’s no Matrix to escape into here, there’s just you, in your bunker, alone with a strange lady’s voice in your head. Apparently there’s still a way to reach the refuge that the other survivors nipped off to, but you’ve got some work ahead of you to get there. Armed with the baddest-assed flashlight since Alan Wake’s chunky Maglite, you must forge out into the ruins of civilization in search of salvage to make your turbo torch even badder-assed. It’s got some neat modes that will help open new paths and options in the wasteland, eventually leading you to the salvation you’ve been looking for.

If you’ve played Big Robot’s older title Sir, You Are Being Hunted, there are some elements here that will feel familiar. The Light Keeps Us Safe is primarily a stealth game, with you striking out from your bunker home into different randomly-generated regions to find the scraps to upgrade your light gun. Your world is pretty much eternally cloaked in night now, leaving you plenty of shadows to skulk through and avoid the glaring gaze of your robot oppressors. Loot for upgrading your flashlight can be found in particularly well-guarded ruins and structures, but the landscape is dotted with interesting locations like old houses, dilapidated gas stations, ruptured chemical tanks, and murky swamps. These places hide lesser loot stashes that can provide you food for surviving, bandages for also surviving, and bottles for making distractions.

What keeps this from becoming a banal light-survival joint is the incredible atmosphere and aesthetic. The first time you step out of your bunker into the still fields, cold moonlight peeking through the clouds to touch the cracked earth, it’s liable to give you chills. Few games have captured that sick, uneasy feeling of being alone and exposed in the dead of night, but The Light Keeps Us Safe does it masterfully. It’s not just window dressing either, because the machines hunting you are all kinds of threatening. Beyond the basic stationary observers that buzz menacingly and the crab-like monstrosities stamping around, there are utterly alien designs like floaters, invisible sentries, and projected spheres of energy that will track you down. There’s one that gets introduced in the third level that is absolutely terrifying in scope, partly because I thought it was part of the environment at first. So much of what you see here is bizarre and counter to your expectations that it can’t help but unnerve.

Your flashlight upgrades can help you deal with some of these threats, because they’re not just there to make the beam brighter. Every time you improve your weapon it gains a new light mode, which includes familiar features like a concentrated beam and less familiar ones like a light that brings non-existent things into being. You’ll have to experiment to see how each new mode interacts with the enigmatic features of the world, and there are some really great moments that come about with these discoveries. It’s actually a fine example of game mechanics contributing to the storytelling, because there’s some serious world-building that happens once you realize how some of your modes work.

If The Light Keeps Us Safe was just a tight, creepy adventure it would be an easy recommendation. But I mentioned Early Access before, because unfortunately this title bears some ugly marks from the process. It won’t be long into your journey that you start noticing the muddy controls, how your character tends to stick on certain corners or get caught by invisible walls. This can happen to the enemies as well, ruining some of that all-important tension. Ladders are a particular killer, with a bug that can literally send you flying off into space and force a restart from your last checkpoint. There’s a conspicuous lack of polish everywhere you look, too, from the clunky menus and UI to the lack of video options to the weird brightness screen that pops up after every single loading screen. It hurts to say it, but the game really does feel unfinished in how rough so many of the all-important gamefeel edges are.

Even the story suffers from being undercooked, building plenty of atmosphere but not much substance, and it ends in just as unsatisfying a place. So that’s the real question when faced with picking this one up, are you looking for a complete experience, or just an impressive one? The first few hours here will be intense and creepy, but beyond that the bugs are going to eat into your fun and it’s going to end without really going anywhere. If you want to experience a strange, alien world full of fear and wonder, by all means pick this one up. But if you’re expecting anything more than that, sadly I can’t really say your time will be worth it.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them on my curation page!

15 minutes in, I tried to climb a ladder and suddenly I was sent spinning through the air. But the game didn't crash. I had the magical power to fly backwards great distances simply by jumping, only I couldn't turn left. Nor, for some reason, could I so much as look at a ladder before my camera turned away.

A drone dropped down from the sky directly beside me, only barely got away. Then I guess I hit a ladder while I was running, because I'm suddenly finding myself slowly flying across the map back to an earlier ladder I climbed. Game was in a bugged state where it thought I was on a ladder, when I wasn't. Couldn't rotate my view much, and couldn't climb the ladder to unbreak anything. I even flew 10 miles away when I tried to jump lol. Reloaded from last save and I was all the way back at the beginning again.

On top of that, I am entirely unable to rebind controls. I click the "bind" button and the game soft locks, with me not being able to do anything aside from hitting alt f4.

Guess I'm refunding it. Shame since this has been on my watch list.

Its a typical Big Robot game:

- Randomly generated terrain
- Stealth-ish gameplay ( I ran through most of the game. )
- Scavenging for loot
- Need to find the same objects over and over to advance
- Story being: "Here is your goal, no go fix it." So not really story heavy.

If this is your thing, you are good.
On the other side, if you played a lot of Sir, You are being hunted the week before playing this game you will see a lot of overlap in its features and gameplay. Only with a different skin essentially.

I've played one run shortly after launch and it seems collision detection isn't really up to scratch yet. A certain type of window allows you to crawl through, which by-passes 99% of the puzzles. And the occasional map object is something you can clip through.

I think its ok. Wait for a sale maybe to get most of the value out of it.

Looking forward to the next game of Big Robot! :D

I would like to recommend this game but right now I can't.

I really like the developer, I thoroughly enjoyed Signal from Tolva but couldn't get into Sir, you are being hunted, TLKUS falls somewhere in the middle.

The atmosphere is awesome! I really like the idea of the game, the different sort of mechanic, the darkness and soundscape is fantastic. However, so many bugs from the early access days are still present. The movement is still quite clunky, you often get stuck on nothing, picking up objects can get frustrating as your hand drifts away for no reason, weird. It just breaks the immersion when you have to put up with those little annoyances. Oh there are several other bugs but I won't bang on.
I wish there was an adjustment for FOV as well, on a widescreen monitor it can feel like moving around with binoculars stuck to your face.

Please Big Robot, finish off those bugs, I want to up vote you :)

A promising game, but...sigh. Avoid. Big time, avoid.
I was one of the people who got this game in early access, back in the beginning. I figured it had a lot of promise, even though it had all the early access problems (bad optimization, lots of bugs, etc). The devs kept saying they knew what was wrong, and were going to fix it. So, okay, right?
And now it's been released.
Graphically the game is great, with tons of atmosphere.
Performance and bug-wise, though, it's still got every single bug and problem I encountered back from day one of early access, and more.
Look in one direction and get glassy-smooth frame rates. Look in another direction with no difference in complexity? Framerate plummets. Try to climb a ladder? Enjoy your trip through the air for the next several minutes, then suffering a bug where you can only look in one direction, forcing you to restart. Trying to walk up stairs? It can be like going up the wrong way on an escalator.
Walking along with no problems? Enjoy getting stuck on a step and being forced to restart. Trying to hop over a small obstacle? Enjoy clipping through and getting trapped in a world of flickering black polygons, until you restart. Trying to find light motes? Here's hoping they don't spawn inside a rock or building wall.
I ran into all of these bugs at least once in less than 45 minutes of playing.
Oh, by the way, forget graphics settings, except for gamma, v-sync, and resolution, there are none. That's it.
TLDR: A bugged wreck. Avoid.

Another game from Big Robot that is just fantastic even now in early access.
They have created yet another amazing and intriguing world that always draws me in to search for more.
The enemies are great. They are all unique, interesting and a little creepy.
Sounds are fantastic. I've really enjoyed the sound design of every Big Robot title I've played. (except the arcing electrical sound please fix it drills into my skull)
The torch is great, what can I say. I really enjoyed unlocking a new mode and getting that realisation of "ohh so that's how I do that".
Visually stunning. Weird, but when you're sitting on top of a factory roof staring out at a post-apocalyptic, irradiated, toxic wasteland, you can't help but admire the beauty of it.
Performance is not perfect right now in some areas, but I have no reason to believe this won't change.
The survival and stealth mechanics are not super fancy or hard currently but I still enjoy it.
The game hasn't gotten stale after two playthroughs of exploring almost every corner of the available four stages.

I think everyone should check it out. I can't wait to see where the plot leads. I hope it's Tolva.

As amazing as the atmosphere and idea is, I can't recommend buying this yet.

It did just launch into early access, but functionality and gameplay really is very very bare bones. The core mechanics are too simple (it's way too easy to figure out where you need to go because every objective has near identical light setups), and the enemies are very simple and very dumb. Once you get over the "I have no idea what that is so I am scared of it" and figure out what each thing is, you realize most things aren't much of a threat at all. There doesn't seem to be any reason to even sneak around other than just avoiding line of sight. I'm not sure why I even need to crouch other than to break line of sight or avoid collision.

Another thing is even when you've been spotted, the enemies lose interest in you so quickly, and there is no real downside to being spotted by the spotlights. I was expecting to have creepy little robots or some big scary thing coming to check out the alert, but all that happened was a small zap that does a very small amount of damage, a pause, then the spotlight went back onto its loop. There was no reason for me to even move away from where I was spotted. I literally just needed to break line of sight for a few seconds then I was fine. That's no fun.

There's absolutely no fear in messing up in this game, not yet anyway, and that unfortunately takes away *all* the creepy factor and the feeling of "I need to stay hidden". Nothing is really a threat, and that is unfortunate. It blows my mind these very dumb robots seemingly managed to take over the world. Once you reconcile that, your immersion is broken and you're reminded you're playing an Early Access game.

The "items" you loot just change numbers in icons in the top right of your screen, and the items you need are in such excess they might as well not have a hunger system or similar if that's all it's going to be.
Loot placement and object design is also not very well thought out, because you can't find loot in most of the pitch black without hitting a key that gives you Ubisoft quest markers all over your screen to show you exactly where to go to hold F to extract literal numbers of loot. You want to be able to find loot, but you also want to have to *look* for it. There is not much survival in walking towards UI markers.
For a game that looks like it's going for immersion, extremely barebones systems like that really take away from the moment and break immersion.

Right now for the game to be fun enough to play and test more, it needs far more intelligent and unpredictable enemies or events, an actual loot system where what you do and don't take actually matters, a well-thought out survival system like The Long Dark (that game's mechanics and weather system alone make for natural moments of terror), some wind sound effects here and there, and actual reasons to be scared and hide other than "oops spotted, better hide for less than five seconds before resuming exactly what I was doing before".

And I'm not necessarily saying a game needs to be hard to be fun, but it certainly needs to have a certain amount of complexity and layers to be fun. Games can be both easy and complex with many layers (see Stardew Valley), but with this game I'd expect the option of very difficult with complexity and many layers (see STALKER or The Long Dark).

An example of really basic layers would be if you get spotted in MGSV, you need to move from where you were spotted because your position has been compromised and that spot will be potentially swarmed with threats. That means you have to consider where you decide to move to based on potential exit strategies; risk vs reward (that is also a huge part of The Long Dark's gameplay). In this game however, there is only one layer. You get spotted, you break line of sight. That's it. You don't need an exit strategy. That means moving around becomes significantly less interesting, and this game is 100% moving around. There is just about no risk to your reward because there is no layers to the threats, not right now as of this review, anyway.

If this game had the mechanical depth and anxiety and dread of The Long Dark but with this atmosphere and setting, it could be such an amazing thing. This atmosphere and environment is so good like STALKER or a bit like some creepy parts of War of the Worlds (with Tom Cruise), or that creepy unknown feeling of Half Life 2 situations or similar settings, but it needs so much more work before it can give the same feelings that something like STALKER or The Long Dark can.
Seriously, it took me about 60 minutes to lose the sense of immersion and caution. That's way too fast. Usually with games like this you don't get comfortable with threats until you're well into 50+ hours. The depth isn't there yet, even for an Early Access game on Steam.

Right now it's just way too soon to play other than beta test for performance issues. I certainly wouldn't pay for this right now, unless you specifically want to support the dev and hope they develop this more over time. For me though it's even way too soon for Early Access other than to show off a very cool environment.

tldr: It's a great atmosphere, but the game itself needs A LOT of work. It feels like an overly simple puzzle game (not even much of puzzles, more like basic very short obstacle courses) in a cool setting with terrible AI and lack of threat of failure, rather than a dread-filled stealth survival game.

I also hope that if the devs somehow read this review, they don't take it hard. I only decided to elaborate so much because the atmosphere of this game REALLY spoke to me, and I'm really hoping it can become something great over time. The aesthetic is there. You guys actually nailed it. It feels like STALKER in many places, and it's something I wished The Long Dark was, so marrying the two (TLD mechanics and TLKUS atmosphere and setting) would be a dream game.

An Early Access campaign can be a long road with lots of twists and turns - this is my day one opinion of what is in front of me.

The dev livestream sold me on the game. We already know the devs deliver quality, interesting products that think outside-of-the-box. So far, The Light Keeps Us Safe is a first-person puzzle game with a stealth skin. What I mean by 'puzzle game' here is that you learn how to 'solve' various obstacles, and difficulty is increased by essentially adding in more obstacles. Things get tight. The whole thing just oozes an interesting universe and atmosphere. The artwork is fantastic. And it really gives you an edge-of-your-seat experience.

Essentially, you have to come out of your bunker complex to gather resources. While they say there isn't crafting, you do collect bits to upgrade your main tool - a super flashlight. The flashlight upgrades add in a Metroidvania component to the game where it allows you to access previously unaccessable areas (new 'outside' levels). When you exit to the outside world, you are 'solving' robots by turning them off and simultaneously gathering resources. You scavenge for bottles to distract robots, bandages for health, food to increase stamina, and then resources to upgrade both your light and bunker.

The use of light in this game is oh-so-fresh and really makes the whole thing shine brilliantly (pun intended). You are safe in the light. This is so counter-intuitive when being chased by robots, but man, it works. You can also stun robots chasing you with your flashlight.

Pros:
+The whole thing is really polished even now
+The idea is super fresh
+I don't like stealth, but this is really well done
+Awesome atmosphere and universe
+Definitely an edge-of-your-seat experience

Cons:
-Needs optimization (hopefully we'll get this throughout the EA campaign)
-I'm the last person to suggest this - but I think it could use a permadeath/ironman mode
-There are frequent game-breaking bugs (the ladder bug, first and foremost)
-Not all that much content right now (10/2018)

Yeah, this is a really neat experience. Worth full price.