From my recent experience in Inkshade I’ve found that lighting levels can have a huge impact on not only how a game plays but generally how it feels. This is no revelation, as horror games have utilised this for years by making their games dark, murky and difficult to see through at times deliberately to make things scarier. However, what about games that make themselves dark for atmosphere alone?
Inkshade did this pretty well having it almost seem dream-like with how little you could see at various points and how much the darkness interacted with your sense of dread and wonder. Other games however sometimes just have the issue of lighting levels being badly adjusted and so rather than things being dark and mysterious for the sake of being scary it’s just because some numbers in the code didn’t interact well together and created a weird visual bug. Darkness can be a comforting thing as well as a scary thing, and playing with lighting levels in games can really set the tone for how the adventure is going to play out in future.
What I’m curious about though is what are some examples you can think of in which darkness was utilised well in a game? let us know in the comments! That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.