Static Dread: The Lighthouse Turns Papers, Please Into Eldritch Horror [Review]

Limited scope with big intentions, Static Dread puts us on the job to deliver psychological horror

Horror has always been one of the best genres when you want your scope limited to a single location. Whether it be a mysterious mansion in a forest, a dark and cramped insane asylum, or in this case a lighthouse, there can be something scary about being trapped in a cramped location with untold horrors happening on either side of the doors. Static Dread takes that and combines it with the boring repetition of your average night job and the on the fly judgment calls that come with being the lone watchman of the night.

The set up is simple; long range communication is completely knocked off the grid by a mysterious aurora, forcing humanity to make due with short range communication like radios.  With most modern technology fried and automation of the local lighthouse no longer working, you take up the role of the Keeper, leaving your wife and daughter behind and manning the lighthouse for 15 nights with no relief as you slowly realize that something Lovecraftian is lurking in the waves.

Your main duties are manning the radio, receiving requests from incoming ships and directing them to their ports of call, all the while having to keep track of depth charts, whether or not they’re a part of a slowly growing cult, or have hauled up more than fish during their time out at sea.

All while you wait you manage a stamina and a sanity meter, it’s a night job after all and it’s not a good idea to fall asleep on the job, and strange happenings around the lighthouse force you to constantly run around to keep the lights on, and the occasional technical fault can have you turning the generator back on, restarting the lighthouse’s rotation, or turning the radio tower back on.

You’re visited both night and day by individuals knocking on your front door, either selling you handy supplies that you can purchase with the pay you earn each night (hope you didn’t send too many ships to the wrong place, they’ll dock your pay), or asking for refuge in the lighthouse, which can have an effect on their final fates.

It’s a lonely job; most of your time is spent between tiny rooms of the lighthouse, most of which you can only poke your head inside and examine in a point and click style manner instead of moving around.  You only go outside to fish in the morning if you purchase a fishing rod or when you go to the top of the lighthouse, but the lighthouse itself has some minor exploration elements with hidden rooms to find and some escape room-like puzzles to solve.

The gameplay loop is satisfying, one thing of note is that sometimes it feels difficult to keep track of all the different rule sets each night.  You can move the various papers around on the desk to your desired arrangement, but when drawing the lines to chart their course you have no peripheral vision, forcing you to constantly back out and check your notes.  This problem could be lessened or eliminated entirely if you like to keep a notebook on hand while playing, but for me it felt like trying to do my IT day job on only one monitor.  Doable, but needlessly frustrating at points.

The game also only auto saves at the beginning of each day, so if you have to quit or restart at any point you’re forced to do all your daytime shopping and fishing again before getting back to the night.  A save slot for the beginning of the day and the beginning of the night would have helped if you were confident in your daytime planning and just wanted to hop back into the night.  This is compounded by a bug I ran into a couple of times where the interact prompt would not show up on certain objects in the night, including the radio, which resulted in a soft lock and a reload of my last save.

The story is enough to keep you engaged the whole way through.\ It isn’t just Lovecraft inspired, it’s proper Lovecraft influence, so if this is your first exposure to stuff like Cthulhu or the Necronomicon you may be a bit lost as to the exact weight of these creatures and objects.  However even if you don’t understand the nitty gritty of Lovecraft lore it still can keep you engaged with the various characters you speak to on the radio and come visit you in the lighthouse. There are multiple endings, some characters didn’t quite play out the role I expected, and character fates seem to be mostly independent of those endings, so it does offer some replay value if you want to see what happens if you let someone into the lighthouse or leave them to fend for themselves.  None of the endings quite hit right for me, but I’m satisfied enough with the initial ending that I got.

Overall, Static Dread: The Lighthouse is a fun two weeks and one day as a lighthouse keeper in a Lovecraft apocalypse, it ends exactly when it needs to in order to avoid becoming too repetitive, but it has just enough meat on its bones to prompt you to come back for another shift.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher.