Static Dread: The Lighthouse Review (PC) – Hear The Great One’s Call

Lovecraft and video games haven’t always made for great bedfellows. The hallucinogenic influence of the Old Great Ones tends to be more crystallised into shooting janky-looking monsters or battling a tentacle or two with a green filter thrown over the top of the visuals. I’ve spoken of my disappointment with games that tackle the Lovecraftian worldbuilding like The Sinking City and Call of Cthulu before, at great length. But for every disappointment, there tends to be a cathartic, madness-inducing vision that follows, like Bloodborne.

Static Dread: The Lighthouse succeeds where so often many fail. Instead of emphasising shooting generic monsters and tuning into clunky combat, developer Solarsuit Games has gone all-in on their cosmic forces rituals to tap into the paranoia, derealisation and deeply personal fear of unfathomable knowledge. Static Dread: The Lighthouse understands H.P. Lovecraft’s true horror far better than some other, higher-budget efforts have attempted.

This Is Static, Over

Welcome to the Lighthouse, Keeper. Fresh into your new role of guiding ships through treacherous seas, you must assist – or sabotage – the sailing community of Blackfort and its surrounding population. The local villagers surrounding your tower of light are a curious bunch, and all is most definitely not well in the area. Your Lighthouse is more than it first appears, and its impact on both the story and the people you meet will be far more significant than you first realise.

The narrative of Static Dread: The Lighthouse plays out over 15 in-game days. As Keeper, you’ll be making choices throughout that’ll determine the fate of various characters and the town of Blackfort itself. A mysterious, unknowable power will attempt to sway you into rather questionable situations, and it’ll be your decision whether to feed the power that calls to you or resist it at great potential risk.

I initially went into the game assuming it would be very typical Lovecraftian tropes of fish people, disturbing rituals and corrupted souls talking in riddles. Those are all here in abundance, but some of the moral dilemmas the entity and flawed populace will pose to you are genuinely thought-provoking. Alongside all of this is Keeper’s family, caught up in the mire in Blackfort. It’s a compelling story that will worm its way into your psyche far more effectively than you might even notice.

Till Dread Do Us Part

Upon your taking up residence within the Lighthouse, you’ll need to get accustomed to maintaining the small structure if you’re to survive the ordeal. Static Dread: The Lighthouse is mechanically straightforward, but mentally stressful. As a good Lovecraftian-inspired piece of media should be. You have two roles: guide the ships to port via a map and navigation system, and keep the Lighthouse blasting its beam to weary travellers by keeping the gears running.

Both are intuitive and easy to grasp. You follow set rules for each in-game day for how to navigate ships. It becomes increasingly more difficult with needing to check captain details, considering the depth of the vessel, spotting suspicious activities and sending them to minefields or quarantines, even using specific codes to match ports. One or two sets of rules were a bit too confusing for my liking, and I never made sense of them even by the end of the day, but the increasing complexity is well-handled.

Running the Lighthouse itself is less complex mentally, but stress-inducing emotionally. There are four components (generator, antenna, breaker and rotator) that will (with alarming increasing intensity) periodically shut off. You need all four active to run the radio, and that’s where Static Dread: The Lighthouse really throws the loss of shared reality at you with the force of a Cthulu-sized kraken.

He’s A Keeper

As the days progress, Keeper’s sense of reality will deteriorate. Lights will break, eyes will appear on the walls, whispering will creep into your ears, and the Lighthouse will have more technical problems only you can solve. By the last five days, it becomes overwhelming and fight or flight inducing, in the best way. I was scrambling from room to room to keep the lights on, while desperately trying to direct ships, and not falling victim to loss of sanity.

Staying in the dark too long or becoming too tired will cause the day to end, with potential consequences on what you may have missed. To this end, you must stock up on supplies (both provided and bought) between days and keep your meters topped up. All of this creates a frantic pace when the night strikes, though I found the bonus and fine system a bit arbitrary, especially by the end. You can go fishing, though, and that’s always a welcome change of pace from the insanity of it all.

So, answer the radio, guide ships and keep the lights running, easy enough, right? Well, no. You also need to deal with the locals who’ll turn up on your doorstep. Will you let them in or turn them away? Will you sacrifice them to the demonic entity whispering in your ear or help them overcome their own personal grievances? They’re a varied, fleshed-out and interesting bunch, each endearing and unnerving in their own way. The way their behaviours are always slightly nervy feeds into the sense of Lovecraftian paranoia expertly, too.

Staying Static

Mostly, that’s what stood out to me during my time with Static Dread: The Lighthouse. The focus on the whispering in my ear, the questioning every person’s character and motivation, the “I’m sure that was an eye watching me in the corner”, and the moral quandary of sending a ship into the abyss for what seems like a rightful cause. Solarsuit Games understands that it’s not all about explosions and battles, but rather the unknowing moment of a crackle of radio silence.

Visually, Static Dread: The Lighthouse has a similar palette and aesthetic to Dredge, with a mix of watercolour-esque textures, pixelated environments and a very distinctive colour scheme mixing intense greens and blues with foreboding darkness. The Lighthouse is full of little details like damp invading from the corners, and the uncanny animation movements of certain NPCs are… discomforting.

From the narrative to the gameplay and the visuals, everything just felt very cohesive to me. The developers wanted to create that sense of panic-triggering isolation, as well as a constant worry in the back of your mind that gnaws away as the days go on. They succeed in almost every facet of this, creating one of the most authentic Lovecraftian-themed video games I can remember playing.

Guiding Light

My praise for Static Dread: The Lighthouse has to be tempered somewhat by a couple of issues I ran into while playing. The most pressing is a day 15 bug that prevents me from interacting with the radio as the prompt stops appearing, and no matter how many restarts or messing with everything in the Lighthouse, I just couldn’t progress to finish the last day. Probably as maddening as a cosmic outer God creeping into my psyche. However, the fact that it happens so late doesn’t dampen the overall quality of the game, and I look forward to finishing the last section once it’s patched.

The other aspect is the couple of needlessly complex rules on one particular day with guiding ships, and the slightly over-tuned usage of the Lighthouse gears breaking. However, both of these are insignificant marks on an otherwise Old One-pleasing altar. It’s not quite a perfect video game, but it’s still a remarkably good Lovecraftian-themed one.

As a final parting thought, that’s a nice segway for me to finish on. Static Dread: The Lighthouse is just a fantastic piece of Lovecraftian media. If you get your kicks from being riddled with adrenaline, stress and paranoia, this is going to satisfy even the most carnivorous of unknowable beings.

Static Dread: The Lighthouse is available now on PC via Steam (review platform).

Developer: Solarsuit Games
Publisher: Polden Publishing

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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