The Light Keeps Us Safe is the latest wonderfully titled game from Big Robot, makers of Sir, You Are Being Hunted and The Signal From Tolva. I'm definitely getting some Inside [GN score: Perfect] vibes mixed with a little Zombies, Run!, if you happen to be familiar with that mobile exercise game.
The camera only moves left and right, forward and backward in this trailer—which, I'll admit, is what hinted at the look and feel of Playdead's Inside. But the environments in The Light Keeps Us Safe are very much three-dimensional, not 2D sidescrolling. As with Big Robot's previous games, The Light Keeps Us Safe utilizes procedural generation to toss a little randomness into the equation. This is a stealth and evasion game. You're not going to be going toe-to-toe with these terrifying machines, no sir. No sense of what the main character looks like yet, but if Big Robot follows its own throughline, you'll be in first-person.
So there's pervasive darkness. We see that much. And while the light certainly keeps us safe, that doesn't appear to include red light. Red light is bad. Every gamer instinctively knows that. The voice on the radio is perhaps a tad poetic as it urges you to "wake up the light." But doing that and getting back to the voice on the radio, back to safety, all makes sense. They probably could've left out the name of the game in the trailer. You never heard Master Chief say, "That thing is shaped kinda like a Halo," and Nathan Fillion never outright said, "We're fulfilling our Destiny!" But whatever, I'm kind of okay with them laying it on a little thick. The atmosphere in The Light Keeps Us Safe is doing good things otherwise. This one's going on my Wishlist.
The Light Keeps Us Safe is going the Early Access route on Steam. It has an October 11 release on PC.
