This review contains spoilers
Keep the Lights On is a side scroller atmospheric horror game developed by Light the Lantern Studios, not to apparently be confused with Lantern Light Studios of “The King’s Feast” fame apparently. Like many small indie horror game studios, the origins of how this game came to be and fascinating studio history isn’t around yet. Like many of the short horror games that I’ve been playing for free recently, I believe I originally found this title via AlphaBetaGamer and I saw the low-res pixelated look mixed with the horror themes and figured I’d eventually give it a shot. That shot didn’t come around until this month, where I was streaming some games for a friend of mine in a build up of sorts to Halloween (along with The Complex: Found Footage, He Needs His Medicine and Unsorted Horror).
The plot is as follows: you are Edmund Rosenthal, an alcoholic private detective whose wife Helen recently passed away from a disease. You’re in shambles emotionally and financially, and for Edmund the future is looking bleak. However, a letter arrives from Vivan Newport, a woman whose estate holds an old convent with a history of disappearances. She wants you to investigate this so she can move on from the past history and renovate it into a home after 200 years of it just sitting there. Without any work, Edmund goes out to the estate to investigate only to find supernatural forces and proceeds to find out what happened here. One moment that made me really feel something was the part where you encounter the ghost of your dead wife Helen on the Bell Tower, who urges you to move on from the past and heal instead of hanging onto her. Of course, you can refuse and there’s a bad ending/achievement for this, but in order to progress the game you have to help Eddie move on. While I don’t remember all the lines much, and as tropey as it kinda was I’m weak for emotional themes and that was really nice.
As for the conflict in the story, the background plot follows a nun named Beatrice, whose child had recently died of unknown complications. In her grief, she made contact with Salvinus, a snake demon who promised her that she would see her child again if she were to worship him. Now of course, one never trusts a snake demon with all the “Garden of Eden” bulls h i t but it’s because of this that the convent has been haunted. There’s a bit of a parallel about how both Edmund and Beatrice deal with their grief, with the themes that hanging onto it will only lead you into desperation and misery and that it’s okay to move on; along with themes of forgiveness. I won’t reveal more because it’s short, but you’ll find incidental pieces of lore surrounding the events from spots in the convent you’ll come across, mostly old letters/dialogue with ghosts. The ending of course results in Edmund fighting off the possessed ghost of Beatrice with holy water and Beatrice being reunited in heaven with her child. Overall while the story has been done before, the execution of it was nice and I enjoyed my time with it.
The gameplay aspects could be a tad bit better; it’s a side scroller where you choose to go into different rooms and solve puzzles while also engaging in combat with evil spirits. The combat isn’t great, and revolves around picking up holy water to throw at ghosts. Problem is, the holy water takes a bit to get rid of and these ghosts charge fast, so you’ll most likely accrue damage anyways. Luckily you can just get an infinite amount of this water by entering and exiting locations where they’ll be at, but it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to even deal with this system and it’s better to just leave any ammo for the final boss. The best recommendation is to jump, and as long as you time it right you can jump over most of these ghosts just fine though I did have trouble with their hitboxes every now and then. Most of the game's puzzles are for the most part fine, though trying to get one of the solutions for the secret developer room involved me opening a locked desk by, get this, climbing to the attic and jumping repeatedly in a spot until I crashed through the floor. They did give a blurb about this when you first came up but it took me ages as well as a Youtube walkthrough before I did it, and the only thing that popped in my head was “what the hell is this s h i t?”. Sometimes you can figure it out like that, sometimes it feels like a bit of a mixed bag though what I can say is that I suck at puzzles anyways so maybe it’s just me? Also unless you want to get stuck, if you go to the bell tower area, don’t pick up the ladder and drop it on the ledge before jumping into the hole. I did that once, and while it’s not smart and I did just reload to a previous save it’s kind of a pain to have something that could make you reset your entire game if you decided to jump into the hole without any way to get out. My solution would be to provide a box or two so one could get out realistically, but yeah don’t jump down without the ladder because the ladder is needed for puzzle stuff later on. The final thing I can share with this is that if you have F12 as your screenshot button then be careful, as pressing it in game will bring out the DevTools Chrome Extension in game, and that was confusing to see pop up.
The atmosphere/sound design is pretty solid too, the rain and water sounds when you’re outside towards the bridge sound amazing. Creaky doors and the pattering of footsteps add to the atmospheric part of the horror, as does the instrumental music in the background which is very lowkey but conveys the mood well. There isn’t any voice acting so most of the sounds you’ll hear with dialogue are the sounds of what seems to be typewriters going off as the text appears on screen. As for the atmosphere and graphics, graphically this is definitely more in the line of those 8-16 bit titles of old but with that distinct indie flair that feels like an adaptation that one can tell the difference but not describe it well. It’s dark and moody, and screams gothic horror with barely any light sources that could come straight out of an old eighties horror flick.
My thoughts on this game are as follows: for a free title the game’s pretty good! It’s not mind blowing persay, and there are some things that I would consider to be issues but as a first stepping stone for the developers I’d say they did a pretty good job here. The game has a creepy atmosphere and an interesting concept with some heartfelt themes that I can plainly say works out. I don’t really know what the next move for these guys are, but considering that the game came out around June 30th of this year I’d say that they’re still doing work and are probably working on their next project hopefully. There’s potential, and hopefully whatever they have going will help Keep the Lights On at home (look please don’t shoot me, I know it’s a bad dad joke). Overall, it’s worth your time and again it’s free; with Halloween coming up if you’re interested in something to help spook up your season then I’d say why not give the game a shot if you’re on a tight budget and/or looking to try out some new stuff from upcoming indie devs.
Links:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3007028229 (Achievement Guide)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMI1ekdJbG4&ab_channel=AlphaBetaGamer (Playthrough)
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
The plot is as follows: you are Edmund Rosenthal, an alcoholic private detective whose wife Helen recently passed away from a disease. You’re in shambles emotionally and financially, and for Edmund the future is looking bleak. However, a letter arrives from Vivan Newport, a woman whose estate holds an old convent with a history of disappearances. She wants you to investigate this so she can move on from the past history and renovate it into a home after 200 years of it just sitting there. Without any work, Edmund goes out to the estate to investigate only to find supernatural forces and proceeds to find out what happened here. One moment that made me really feel something was the part where you encounter the ghost of your dead wife Helen on the Bell Tower, who urges you to move on from the past and heal instead of hanging onto her. Of course, you can refuse and there’s a bad ending/achievement for this, but in order to progress the game you have to help Eddie move on. While I don’t remember all the lines much, and as tropey as it kinda was I’m weak for emotional themes and that was really nice.
As for the conflict in the story, the background plot follows a nun named Beatrice, whose child had recently died of unknown complications. In her grief, she made contact with Salvinus, a snake demon who promised her that she would see her child again if she were to worship him. Now of course, one never trusts a snake demon with all the “Garden of Eden” bulls h i t but it’s because of this that the convent has been haunted. There’s a bit of a parallel about how both Edmund and Beatrice deal with their grief, with the themes that hanging onto it will only lead you into desperation and misery and that it’s okay to move on; along with themes of forgiveness. I won’t reveal more because it’s short, but you’ll find incidental pieces of lore surrounding the events from spots in the convent you’ll come across, mostly old letters/dialogue with ghosts. The ending of course results in Edmund fighting off the possessed ghost of Beatrice with holy water and Beatrice being reunited in heaven with her child. Overall while the story has been done before, the execution of it was nice and I enjoyed my time with it.
The gameplay aspects could be a tad bit better; it’s a side scroller where you choose to go into different rooms and solve puzzles while also engaging in combat with evil spirits. The combat isn’t great, and revolves around picking up holy water to throw at ghosts. Problem is, the holy water takes a bit to get rid of and these ghosts charge fast, so you’ll most likely accrue damage anyways. Luckily you can just get an infinite amount of this water by entering and exiting locations where they’ll be at, but it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to even deal with this system and it’s better to just leave any ammo for the final boss. The best recommendation is to jump, and as long as you time it right you can jump over most of these ghosts just fine though I did have trouble with their hitboxes every now and then. Most of the game's puzzles are for the most part fine, though trying to get one of the solutions for the secret developer room involved me opening a locked desk by, get this, climbing to the attic and jumping repeatedly in a spot until I crashed through the floor. They did give a blurb about this when you first came up but it took me ages as well as a Youtube walkthrough before I did it, and the only thing that popped in my head was “what the hell is this s h i t?”. Sometimes you can figure it out like that, sometimes it feels like a bit of a mixed bag though what I can say is that I suck at puzzles anyways so maybe it’s just me? Also unless you want to get stuck, if you go to the bell tower area, don’t pick up the ladder and drop it on the ledge before jumping into the hole. I did that once, and while it’s not smart and I did just reload to a previous save it’s kind of a pain to have something that could make you reset your entire game if you decided to jump into the hole without any way to get out. My solution would be to provide a box or two so one could get out realistically, but yeah don’t jump down without the ladder because the ladder is needed for puzzle stuff later on. The final thing I can share with this is that if you have F12 as your screenshot button then be careful, as pressing it in game will bring out the DevTools Chrome Extension in game, and that was confusing to see pop up.
The atmosphere/sound design is pretty solid too, the rain and water sounds when you’re outside towards the bridge sound amazing. Creaky doors and the pattering of footsteps add to the atmospheric part of the horror, as does the instrumental music in the background which is very lowkey but conveys the mood well. There isn’t any voice acting so most of the sounds you’ll hear with dialogue are the sounds of what seems to be typewriters going off as the text appears on screen. As for the atmosphere and graphics, graphically this is definitely more in the line of those 8-16 bit titles of old but with that distinct indie flair that feels like an adaptation that one can tell the difference but not describe it well. It’s dark and moody, and screams gothic horror with barely any light sources that could come straight out of an old eighties horror flick.
My thoughts on this game are as follows: for a free title the game’s pretty good! It’s not mind blowing persay, and there are some things that I would consider to be issues but as a first stepping stone for the developers I’d say they did a pretty good job here. The game has a creepy atmosphere and an interesting concept with some heartfelt themes that I can plainly say works out. I don’t really know what the next move for these guys are, but considering that the game came out around June 30th of this year I’d say that they’re still doing work and are probably working on their next project hopefully. There’s potential, and hopefully whatever they have going will help Keep the Lights On at home (look please don’t shoot me, I know it’s a bad dad joke). Overall, it’s worth your time and again it’s free; with Halloween coming up if you’re interested in something to help spook up your season then I’d say why not give the game a shot if you’re on a tight budget and/or looking to try out some new stuff from upcoming indie devs.
Links:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3007028229 (Achievement Guide)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMI1ekdJbG4&ab_channel=AlphaBetaGamer (Playthrough)
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/