The Last Light

The Last Light is a first-person horror game made with the Unreal Engine by a group of students from the Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.

Making a horror game can’t be all that difficult. All you have to do it to turn down the light inside the game and maybe hide a couple of monsters in the closet. It turns out that it’s a little bit more complicated than that, and the developers from Mindtree Games studio understood this all too well. You can’t scare people a lot and expect them to have the same reaction all the time, with the same intensity.

Good developers know that the best part of the horror experience is the anticipation of a something that’s about to happen, and not the experience itself. Yes, you’re going to get scared when you’re attacked in the dark, but it’s only a temporary feeling. The anxiety that you feel while you’re waiting for your demise is much sweeter.

The premise for the game is pretty simple. You take the role of Sophie, a high-school student that wanted to pick up her little brother from the subway, but she’s stuck underground, and a mysterious creature is attacking her.

As the name suggests, the game is centered around the use of light. Whatever monster is hiding in the dark is doing so because it doesn’t like the light. The only way to keep it at bay is to make sure that you have a source of light around at all times.

This is not a very new concept, and it has been used before, even in triple-A games like Alan Wake for example. The Last Light is a little bit different because it’s in first person and there is nothing to interact with, like NPC or other characters. It’s an entirely lonely experience.

The use of the Unreal Engine was inspired, and the game looks fairly good or at least believable enough. This is the full game and not just a demo version, which also means that it’s a hefty download as well.