Today I bring you another new feature, Who's Reading My Mind, in which I scramble to take credit for an idea I've recently learned someone else plans to implement. Word just hit the street that Wayforward Technologies, maker of Contra 4 and Shantae, is developing a Wii Ware game called LIT. According to the press release, it's a 3D horror puzzler about maneuvering a scary, dark environment by creating safe paths with light. That's right, you light the way to presumably stave off whatever horrors lurk in the 3D darkness.
Well! Dudes, I had the same idea back in 2003. Here are some hastily-snapped photos from an old sketchbook.
In my version, each stage was a grid-based dungeon, like from the first Zelda game. The starting room was lit, but the surrounding rooms were dark. There was a mechanism for extending the light from one room to another. Rooms had different qualities: some allowed light to travel through them to the next room in a continuous line; other rooms always redirected the light in a particular direction; other rooms had dials that could be turned to send the light in whatever direction you wanted. So, although it was partly an action game where you'd control a man running around through a series of rooms, performing local actions and physically manipulating his surroundings, it was also a puzzle game in which an entire stage was a tile-based puzzle. The local-scale action was about uncovering all the tiles in the puzzle through exploration -- bombing walls or what have you. It was about assembling the big picture from piecemeal observation. On the higher level, it was a puzzle about sending a signal through a series of redirecting nodes, and the chain reactions that would result from changing the flow somewhere early in the sequence.
Atmospherically, it was horror. The dark rooms were frightening; you'd feel vulnerable there. You'd do everything possible not to go there. There were things living in the darkness, and they could move around freely, with much greater perception and agility than you had. You'd hear them coming, getting louder, long before they'd appear on screen in the top-down perspective. But figure out how to turn the lights on, and you'd transform terrifying rooms into places of comfort. The light rooms were as soothing as the dark rooms were unnerving. But you could could play it how you liked, to some extent, braving the darkness if you were quick enough to evade the monsters, or spending more time on the puzzle aspect to get the lights on and avoid danger. I wanted it to have a real feeling of vulnerability, so you'd think hard to avoid going into dark rooms.
At the end of each stage you'd go down a floor, bringing the light deeper underground. The rooms you lit formed a tenuous strand of illumination and safety in a vast, pitch black underground maze.
At this point, Wayforward have only released one sketch of a weird hair-like creature, leaving many questions unanswered. Will they use a room-by-room approach like my concept, or will the light puzzle be more local (e.g. using flashlights and candles to create paths within an otherwise dark room)? Will it be as awesome as my game would have been if it existed, or only a shabby pretender next to the immaculate precision of my idleness?