Editorials
[Preview] ‘The Light Keeps Us Safe’ Makes You Fear the Dark Once You See the Light
You awaken alone in a dimly-lit room, seemingly in a bunker of some kind. A voice on local comms gets you up to speed as you head towards the exit. Upon leaving the claustrophobic low ceilings of the bunker, you find yourself on a long gangway in a dark and expansive underground cave. It’s at the end of the gangway that you see the first sign of something that doesn’t fit what’s been established. A high tech doorway with a bright energy barrier.
What on Earth has happened to make this life normal for you? Well, that’ll be where you step through that door, pick up a modified torch and head outside to find that the answer is… the machines. The machines and the darkness. This is the world of The Light Keeps Us Safe and it is the latest intriguing example of deprivation of the senses in horror.#
Killer robots of various shapes and sizes roam the land above, hunting anyone foolish or desperate enough to venture there. The upside is, these infernal machines are susceptible to light sources, so you’re safe as long as you either have one or can stand in one. The snag in that well-woven plan is that light is in incredibly short supply on the surface these days.
The Light Keeps Us Safe‘s surface world is unsurprisingly gloomy. The inky darkness envelopes whole swathes of the horizon and the only reprieve are either the hazy radiance of certain buildings and streetlights or the threatening glow of the machines and the structures they’ve created. The feel is very much one of a 1980’s idea of an apocalyptic future. The Terminator seems like the obvious nod, but developer Big Robot has a far wider range of media influences to call upon than that.
Films by Tarkovsky and David Lynch helped inspire the tone, backed by musical influences such as Boards of Canada and Tim Hecker. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was a book that played a significant role in the oppressive, bleak vibe of this barren world (thankfully, The Light Keeps Us Safe, while oppressive, is not as bleak as McCarthy’s book). In terms of how it looks, you can see quite quickly that Arkane’s Dishonored is a touchstone, especially in the strange machine structures design, but Jim Rossignol, head of Big Robot, also cites S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as another influence. Both can be felt in how the game looks and plays.
Certainly, the stealth is something of an inversion of Dishonored. Whereas the shadows were your friend there, here you’re literally hiding in plain sight by seeking the safety of brightly-lit areas. There is a need for sneaky stealth too, but the dark that normally helps hide you, is as much an enemy as the machines, and the only respite from the zap-happy tin terrors in the dark is to hide in or behind something and pray the threat wanders off instead of investigating your hiding spot. In the early hours, this is your key strategy. Your torch can ward off the machines temporarily, but wits and cunning are just as handy.
You and your flashlight against an army of murderbots in unending darkness may seem a tad unfair, and in truth, the odds are definitely in favor of those with circuitry, but that flashlight you carry is modular, and it can do some pretty remarkable things with light. In addition to fending off machines, the torch can be adapted to foil traps, open new areas, and discover hidden places that can only be seen in a certain light. There’s likely to be more to it than that as things progress, but so far it’s a fine amount of variety that shifts the current obstacles and challenges about fluidly, and the modular flashlight is a neatly-simplified way of carrying a toolkit full of abilities.
Even in its Early Access phase, The Light Keeps Us Safe is showing its talent for a tense game of Cat and Mouse. There’s a splendid sense of impending dread as you peer into the long, looming darkness, gauging how long it will take you to reach the safety of the next precious light source and the exhilaration of making it by the skin of your teeth is often almost euphoric. Even when you gain more means of fighting back the threats are leveled accordingly. If that remains the case throughout and any frustration is tempered, then this has real potential for longevity.
One tried and tested (and reviled in some corners of the internet) way to keep up longevity and dread is procedural generation and The Light Keeps Us Safe employs that to its map each time. With its strong visual design, there is not much dilution of identity caused by the procedural map and the dark and open nature of the game world means randomness is not all that intrusive to the experience. After all, you’re largely running blindly into the dark whatever the map is like.
Being Early Access, you’d expect some technical gripes and there’s definitely a few fixable issues. The frame rate can suffer occasionally but has been largely fairly stable. There are instances of textures not loading and some pop-up, but again, nothing out of the ordinary for a game in its nascent stages. To be honest, The Light Keeps Us Safe is one of the better examples of an Early Access game. The edges are a touch rough, yet largely, this is a polished affair already.
The base of it is much like any other survival game, though wisely, crafting is not a thing here, and that is going to be a problem for those exhausted by that genre, but the atmosphere of The Light Keeps Us Safe, and its focus on moment-to-moment survival, really helps it strengthen its identity. If it leaves Early Access with the focus in the right places (a stumbling block of many titles to go through the program) then The Light Keeps Us Safe could well be a long-term success. For now, it’s a refreshingly focused survival effort that brings new light to the fear of the dark.
Preview code provided by the publisher
The Light Keeps Us Safe is out now on Steam in Early Access.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
You must be logged in to post a comment.