Deadlight: Director's Cut

The way this games represents the vibe of the 80s and the bleakness of a zombie apocalypse is just unforgettable. Albeit a bit short, it's an amazing experience!

Deadlight: Director's Cut was released in 2016. And it's about a grizzly survivor type guy, with a woodsman beard and rough voice, avoiding zombies. In 2016. The voice acting is sub-par. The game comes with the usual cliches, looking for friends, then family, hallucinations and Joel wannabe machismo. The animations are sluggish. Joel-- I mean Randall, snaps to ledges and interrupts whatever animation he was doing if you press the jump button. Cutscenes are static images moving slightly in one direction or another. They're okay. The dialogue doesn't help though. I wonder if it would have been a more intriguing game if the protagonist was deaf so he wouldn't have to listen to himself or others talking. The puzzles are aim this at that and make sure to jump properly. Nothing mind bending. And the secrets are highlighted so you can't really miss them unless you go the right way because you thought there was a secret that way. There is combat but it's rarely a good choice. You can outrun and trap zombies, because they can't climb or get out of holes, which I think it's a good thing. It's an okay game if you want to waste a few (very few) hours or you're really into zombies. It has its cliches though, and the atmosphere isn't that compelling, to me at least. I had fun, albeit at making my own challenges, like a no-zombie-kill run or all-zombie-kill run. It has nice extras though.

TL:DR The experience of the game's story is good, the actual gameplay is clunky with keyboard and mouse (I don't have a controller to test it) if you want to buy it wait for it to go on sale The Good -The game looks really good when it didn't need to be since it's a side scroller platformer -The characters have fairly good voice acting and the character art in the cutscenes are amazing The Bad -The controls are pretty clunky and somewhat unresponsive when doing the wall jump mechanic which becomes very important later on -The game has a bunch of cheap deaths from falling debris thats happens when you don't jump or run fast enough due to the clunky controls

I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed this. It wasn't my usual style of game - I find a lot of platformers more frustrating than they're worth - but GoG had it for free one day and I finally got around to playing. Finished it over two sessions in two days, a short game but that was fine for me. The good: Really liked the graphics style that was both crisp and minimal in the foreground, but really gorgeous to look at in the complicated background with feasting zombies, broken cars and burning cities. The story and characters weren't compelling, but finding scraps that other survivors left behind in the world, and bits and pieces of the main guy's own missing memory, helped flesh things out. The platforming puzzles were my favorite part - the solutions weren't always immediately apparent but never difficult to figure out, I had to use all the skills at my disposable at various moments, and often there was more than one way to pull it off, so I never felt railroaded. The not-so-good: Controls were okay for the most part, shooting was great, getting jumps right was satisfying, but melee combat was a crapshow, imprecise and with a pointless stamina meter, and the zombies are all but unaffected by an axe in the face anyway. Thank god for guns and avoidance. There's one infuriating part which you can find other players complaining about if you search for "Deadlight helicopter chase" online. Let me just say it's a bad idea to have a chase section where you have to climb over fences, but you can't climb faster than usual, and the character randomly stops responding to commands altogether while you're trying to get him off the freaking fence. That sequence was the reason I need two sessions to finish instead of one, so much rage, but thankfully, nothing else was as bad. Overall, pretty fun game that I think I would have been happy to get on sale and felt lucky to get for free.

I don't normally enjoy horror or zombie games, but this one was interesting. Graphically, it's well presented and the levels are interesting and varied. I did start to get sick of almost QTE type sequences towards the end though. Speaking of the ending, this game is _short_. I hit the ending (with just over 2 and half hours of play through) without even realising it was the ending at first. Plus, the ending was rubbish. Overall, it was an average game which I will quickly forget - it has zero replay value.