#576: No One Lives Under The Lighthouse
PSX-era throwback an interesting short-form chiller — but no, Robert Pattinson isn’t in it
Initial release: April 21, 2020 (original version)/May 18, 2023 (Director’s Cut)
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBox One, XBox One X/S, Switch
Developer: Marevo Collective (as Sowoke Entertainment Bureau for the original)
Video games as a medium is deeply cyclic and driven by nostalgia. Everyone who plays video games, from boomers who were around for the likes of Wizardry and Ultima to zoomers for whom Zelda II means Tears of the Kingdom, has nostalgia for a bygone era of video games. For me personally, and a whole lot of people in their 30s and 40s, that is the the late 1990s: the era of the original PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the Sega Saturn; the era of chunky polygons, jittering textures, voice acting recorded in a refrigerator box; the era of “3D” as a new concept.
And so, after a decade-plus of trying to play on 8- and 16-bit nostalgia, we’ve moved into the 32-bit throwback period, and honestly I hope we stay in it. That seems to be the hope of Puppet Combo and its Torture Star Video imprint as well, being at the forefront of aesthetic throwback games trying to mimic both the golden age of survival horror (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and all their hangers-on) as well as the best/worst of the early 80s, post-Halloween slasher craze. Which brings us to No One Lives Under The Lighthouse.
Initially developed by a Ukrainian 3-person team under the name of Sowoke Entertainment Bureau, Lighthouse’s inspirations are obvious from the jump, with its lo-fi textures, (somewhat) primitive lighting model, a polygon count so low you could probably measure it with your fingers, and a deeply chunky internal resolution that makes every pixel a mile wide. There’s almost no voice acting whatsoever save for the occasional grunt and scream; there’s hardly even any music. It’s as low-key as it gets: no HUD, no real inventory (you just cycle through the items you have until you find the one you want) and the emphasis is on solving light puzzles and — on occasion — evading threats. The gameplay is pretty simple overall: you’re the new hire for the United States Lighthouse Establishment, come to replace the previous keeper who disappeared. Over the course of a few days, you’ll be maintaining the lighthouse and the grounds around it, but it quickly becomes apparent that you’re not alone on the island.
Of course, there are obvious thematic inspirations, as well. Right off the bat you can see how Robert Eggers’ 2019 film The Lighthouse was an influence, and indeed this game ramps up the cosmic horror by quite a bit. How this plays out, however, is quite different depending on which version you play; the original version, released in 2020, has been supplanted by a “Director’s Cut” version, released in 2023, the now-six-person dev team renaming themselves to Marevo Collective to reflect and publishing the title multiplatform via Torture Star Video, and the new version drastically changes the back half of the game. It’s bigger, longer, and weirder, though the moth motif that so strongly defined the original game and its primary threat has been dialed back for something a little more generic. The scene of an enormous swarm of bat-sized moths covering the lighthouse remains, however, with the added element of the glass windows cracking under the weight.
Despite these changes, both versions of the game are basically the same; the older version is rawer, whereas the newer version, while still maintaining the PSX aesthetic, is slightly better looking — like a PlayStation game made in 1999 as opposed to 1996. The old version is more straightforward, but the Director’s Cut adds a lot of thematic elements like Tarot cards and the like. Both games are so short that it’s worth playing through both just to see how they’re different.
You won’t see a lot in the way of deep gameplay from Lighthouse; like many of its brethren, it’s part of a trend of short-form horror games, stuff that lasts maybe 2 hours at most, as opposed to the 10–15 hour titles that we used to load into our PlayStations back in the day. But it’s still a decently fun time, provided you don’t mind the mild tedium of maintaining the lighthouse (which may have been the point.) I hope to see more quality work from Marevo with the upcoming Ukraine War-inspired Zero Losses and the late 90s-internet inspired Hollowsk 1999 3D.
No One Lives Under The Lighthouse is available now on Steam. To play the original version, right-click the game in your Steam library, select Properties, click on Betas and change the Beta Participation drop-down menu option from “None” to “Original.” To change back to the Director’s Cut version, simply change the beta version back to “None.”
