Nautical horror game Static Dread is like a Lovecraftian Papers Please

Lighthouses are bad news, everybody knows that. Just ask Jack from Bioshock. Or Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse. Or Lena from Annihilation. Across all media—just take those mainstream examples from games, films, and literature respectively—lighthouses are creepy and filled with incomprehensible horror. Static Dread The Lighthouse follows in the eerie footsteps of Bioshock and Dredge with its own spin on the creepy lighthouse genre, mixing Papers, Please style gameplay with old school graphics and that eldritch Lovecraftian horror.

Listen, if you put the word Lovecraftian next to Papers, Please, I'm paying attention. Chthonic monsters and the crippling fear of bureaucracy? Sign me right up. But Static Dread The Lighthouse looks like more than a sum of its parts. It's got 3D first-person exploration, for starters, which neither Lucas Pope nor H.P. Lovecraft had in their games. Books. You know what I mean.

Aping some of the best horror games of recent years—I'm looking at the likes of Mouthwashing, Threshold, and Arctic Eggs, all published by newcomer Critical Reflex—this lo-fi style really lends itself to the genre. Building layers of fear in the shadows and utilizing the retro filters to achieve that unsettling sense of dread, it's surprising that few games have brought Chthonic influences into this before.

Lovecraft reveled in exploring the unknowable horrors and incomprehensible creatures he attempted to describe on the page. It worked because readers had no images, their own imaginations filled in the gruesome gaps. Films, games, and other visual media cannot do the same. But a retro aesthetic can muddy details and let our minds wander to darker places than the game itself would ever dare go.

Time will tell if Static Dread can live up to the mighty titles it namedrops as inspirations, but initial reviews sit at 'positive' on Steam and it currently has a very respectable average score of 85 on Metacritic.

Static Dread The Lighthouse is available now on Steam for 25% off, $9.74 / £8.24. You can download it here.

If you're interested in more cool games that do interesting things with genre, check out our list of the best indie games for inspiration. While Static Dread's compatibility is unknown, it looks like the perfect game for Valve's handheld, so why not check out the best Steam Deck games while you're installing it?

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