Big Robot, developer of the acclaimed zany British survival title Sir, You Are Being Hunted, has released a trailer for their next effort. Titled The Light Keeps Us Safe, the game is a take on the trials of surviving a procedural-generated apocalypse with an emphasis on ‘stealth and evasion’ to evade patrolling machines. Light also plays a huge role as a source of power to deal with traps laid out by errant machines.
Elaborating more on the game’s newly established Steam page, Big Robot explains that the sky has effectively ‘gone out’. Burrowed in the confines of a relatively safe bunker, players are forced to venture into the world outside due to diminishing food and power supplies, and the ever growing threat of ‘those things out there in the dark’. Beyond the needs of staying alive, player must follow in the footsteps of others, who’ve been fortunate to reach ‘The Light’ in the bunker, a kind of luminescent redemption.
Unlike many survival games, Big Robot has forgone crafting, preferring to rely on clever puzzles and interactions involving light. The open-world is large from what we gather and ripe for exploration, though extremely dangerous mainly because the machines are particularly aggressive and adept at halting player progression. Big Robot qualify it as a persistent ‘grim sense of existential threat’. Each play through also promises to be completely different due to the procedural generation of the landscape. As for where the mysterious machines or robots come from and what their purpose is, well, Big Robot have remained characteristically schtum about the whole thing.
The Light Keeps Us Safe trailer is a suitably creepy and atmospheric statement of intent. The desperate tones of a heavily set Scottish accent envelop the short clip with a tangible sense of urgency. It depicts a desolate, foggy landscape peppered with alien AI controlled pivoting surveillance cameras, low-hovering drones, and a large flying mech with upward pointing plinths. You can check it out below.
The Light Keeps Us Safe is scheduled to release on Steam Early Access on October 11th of this year with a full launch planned for the early months of 2019.
