One of 2023’s highest rated indies was DREDGE, a compelling and bleak (or compellingly bleak) fishing sim with an unmistakable Lovecraftian influence. Imagine, if you can, a side story set in the same universe, only you play as a hardworking lighthouse keeper instead of a humble fisherman. That’s Static Dread: The Lighthouse in a nutshell, complete with a few elements borrowed from fellow indie hit ‘Papers, Please’ when it comes to choosing where to divert the various vessels dependant on your instructions. Life dependant, no less.
Viewed from a first-person perspective, and using purposely grimy low-res textures, the pressure is mounted upon you from the very first shift. You’re the newest person to be entrusted with a rundown lighthouse, with the previous keeper no longer capable of carrying out their duties. This role involves resting during the day and having a bite to eat to restore focus, before switching on the juice and tuning in the radio to correct frequencies. Ships in the area will then request safe passage to numerous docks, providing documents via fax. These must be examined for authenticity before marking out a route and hitting the send button. It’s immediately obvious that not all is well within the docks, with fishermen reporting of mutated fish, and sailors claiming to hear voices. No wonder the previous keeper quit.
Being ramshackle, the lighthouse calls for attention too. Tasks such as restoring power and re-activating the rotation module, which mercifully require just a few button presses, force you to leave your desk unmanned for a few minutes.
Sorting through the wealth of papers on the desk can be finicky when they begin to pile up, and having to tune the radio by rotating the analogue stick can be bothersome, but eventually you’ll pick up tricks to speed up these processes. Failure to direct ships correctly results in a fine. If you act correctly, rarely are you praised, which is kind of understandable considering you’re merely carrying out duties as expected.
Another distraction is that the lighthouse’s door is often knocked on, with visitors including the town’s elder, a rather butch hunter, the weary courier responsible for your food parcels, and a fisherman that the town have ousted. These characters – each presented using evocative 2D artwork – are reoccurring and have their own storyline threads, with your decisions having an impact. Many shady characters show up towards the end of your mandated fifteen-day shift, making opening the door to strangers even more of a gamble. Some, such as a girl who has become lost in the woods, may even ask to stay the night. This goes against the sheriff’s rulebook. But who’s to know, eh?
A couple of days into the role, exploring the lighthouse’s rooms in the process, an otherworldly entity referred to as ‘The Darkness’ makes themselves known, conversing in a demanding tone. They promise to make your life easier if you follow their rules, with the first instance of this involving sending ships into the heart of a storm in return for said storm calming in a matter of hours rather than days. There’s even gentle encouragement to start walking this dark path, with the harbour home to drug traffickers who’ve flooded the streets with a powerful drug created using glowing crystals found ashore. Throwing another spanner into the works, this entity claims to know the whereabouts of your family, making numerous threats to their safety.
As the night rolls on, sleep deprivation starts to take its toll, resulting in things becoming even more surreal. Visions appear, red insignias smother the walls, picture frames fly off their hooks, and the great outdoors starts to put on a lightshow. The sense of dread is impeccable, with the radio picking up warped signals while the background music becomes increasingly raucous until sunrise – which is when everything suddenly settles, leaving you to clean up the mess before hitting the hay.
By introducing several key characters at once, Static Dread is able to engage instantly. Every shift also introduces something new, be it a revised chain of command or a new radio frequency. There’s rarely a dull moment, although it is prone to temporarily settling into a loop of tuning the radio, answering the door, removing insignias, and keeping things functioning. Variety comes from the demands made by demonic forces, along with the strict instructions given at the start of your shift. Certain vessels must be directed to certain docks, and later depth charts come into play – along with mines and a military presence. It’s also your call how to handle the more unnatural discoveries, sending evidence to a science lab or causing a ship to go astray.
As the story unfolds, the lighthouses’ additional rooms start to serve a larger purpose, with a hidden basement to find and puzzle solving elements coming into play. All of this wraps up superbly, with the company you’ve chosen to keep eventually going on to fulfil their destinies – all of which you’ve had a hand in. In the space of just a few hours, you go from being a humble and observant lighthouse keeper to having some incredibly important decisions to make.
It’s a heck of a trip, offering a great deal of replay value thanks to its multitude of endings, and the three hour (approx.) runtime makes a second (or third) playthrough viable, in the sense that it isn’t too time consuming to see everything.
The only major downside is that from start to end you’re confined to the lighthouse’s walls – the occasional dream-like sequence notwithstanding. On that subject, Static Dread may very well result in lucid dreams come bedtime, with its evocative sights and sounds leaving an impression after turning off the TV. Like staring at the northern lights, it’s nothing short of mesmerising.
solarsuit.games’ Static Dread: The Lighthouse is out now on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, and Xbox One. A PC version launched in August. Published by Games Harbor.