Game 31: Golden Light

Continuing in the vein of scary games for Halloween, I've chosen Golden Light, which is a wild-looking FPS roguelike. Things start off perfectly fine.

I'm dating a pronoun. And that bike is rusted to hell.

I go pick a rose for my paramour and She gets dragged into Hell

This was a bad first date

Ever the hero, I jump down after here to find myself in the 'Gut', a shifting meaty labyrinth of awful.

We're sorry but the real princess is in some other godforsaken room

The best way I can describe this game is 'discordant and disturbing', and that goes double for the sound. Random creepy audio while I'm wandering around is keeping me on edge.

Strange nonsensical notes litter the room

This game has an unusual 'innovation' - you can eat your weapons.

Just what I always wanted to eat

Like many roguelikes you get a choice of random upgrades for the run you're on - in this case by finding 'mementos' in the form of photographs.

Let's see... do more damage or have a meat mole grab me sometimes?

My first encounter with a monster is terrifying - many of the monsters in this game just look like furniture until you get close, when they reveal themselves by popping into their normal form and attacking you.

This is me getting beat up by an Ottoman

I ended up eating my revolver to stay alive when it was out of ammo - it both healed me and caused bleeding, so there's good and bad to putting a gun in your mouth. There's also good and bad when it comes to putting your hand in meat holes.

This turned out way better than I expected it to

The objective of each level is to find keys, and then use those keys to unlock the door to the next level down. I have no idea how deep I need to go to find Her. Besides weapons there are sub-items like a gold tooth or eyeballs attached to fingers. You can either eat these or throw them at enemies.

Throwing the eye-fingers caused a blazing inferno and burned a monster to death.

When I descended to the next level I saw Her - possibly the real Her.

Our time together was all too brief.

There's an interesting variety of weapons. I've found ammo for a thompson, a revolver, a knife, an axe, and.... a camera!

Hitting monsters with this stuns them. Also I love the ceiling hands.

I died on the second level and I found myself in a small graveyard, in a field of flowers.

She's not here, I have to get back in there and find her

Interestingly, I can still find ammunition and mementos to upgrade myself in this between-run area. And some of these upgrades are pretty unusual.

This made me very short and very fast

This outdoor area is very large! It's not your typical roguelike 'room where you spend gold for permanent upgrades' deal, I've kept the gold I had when I died but I haven't found anything to spend it on. I did find a bike that I can ride and get around this place faster with.

Also the bike has a skull on it that talks to me

I found my way back into the Gut, and interestingly I don't have to start over from the beginning - I'm resuming on the same level that I died on. I also found a guy in a phone booth that, for gold, will start me on an easier level - in a roguelike that may be the way to go, because the upgrades you get earlier will make you stronger and let you become strong enough to get through the harder levels below.

The words on this note disappeared as I read it and then the note exploded

Not everything in the dungeon is dangerous - there's a couple NPCs down here that trade gold for various favors.

A horrible monster just standing around? That's a friend. You have to watch out for chairs and books.

There are map stations every so often that sketch out the area for you and put up question marks where items and monsters are.

Some of those question marks are the keys I need.

Playing this is intense - they really nailed the atmosphere and I'm tentative about approaching any given object because it might just come alive and attack me. Actually, some of these monsters are not mimics after all.

Some are just plain horrible instead of pretending to be something they're not

I'm finding a lot of gases and other things that cause status effects. Some are intuitive, like poison and bleeding which hurt you. Others are... a bit unusual.

I can't fight the monsters if I love them

Speaking of love, one of my mementos resulted in having a little friendly mimic wander around and fight for me.

I named him Kurt

After dying again, I took some more time to explore the overworld.

And there is some cool freaky stuff going on in this overworld

customed in roguelites to getting currency that persists between runs and spending it on upgrades, but in Golden Light it appears that there are items in the overworld that can increase your overall health and damage resistance and you have to find them.

I found a map which helps explore this place immensely, the overworld looks the same everywhere

I also found a crazy sword that one-shots the enemies here and got a bunch of gold, which I gave to Piano guy and unlocked additional areas, earning me a couple permanent upgrades to my max health. Then I found a giant typewriter and tried to use it.

Doing that caused me to end up here

And then I got thrown into Gut and started pretty deep in there.

I'm sorry, Floor WHAT?

As you might expect, I died without completing the floor - but not before I found a badass tommy gun and slaughtered several foes with it.

Toothy Dude I will miss not having you. This thing had triple barrels!

The items you find like fish heads, gold teeth and such all have their effects randomized every run, so when you first find an object you won't know what it does. You can either eat them or throw them and I think they have more bad effects than good so it's probably safer to throw them if you don't know what something does.

Reading some notes will identify what an item does so they're worth picking up

Based on some dialogue from Her I suspect that I need to find all Her parts to win, or at least to progress to something else.

I had the option to kiss her (and did) and I suspect that caused monsters to invade the floor when I picked up the last key

I'm starting to learn to survive longer and some interesting tricks. I found a Pistol that causes regeneration when it shoots, so if I shoot myself with it I lose some life but over time regain more. I also got better with melee - I ran into a floating ball of arms that attacked me called Carre and managed to get the best of it with a baseball bat.

After defeating Carre I found Her Head

Sadly the head-bone is not connected to anything, and I don't know if it was beating Carre that caused She's Head to appear at the end of the level or if it was just random - but I have one part of Her! After retrieving her head I was immediately sent back up to the fields without dying or losing my upgrades, and I've now figured out that picking up a rose in the fields is giving me regen. One of the mementos I found on this run gave me a laser-blast out of my eyes so I'm easily able to kill the mushroom people and mimics wandering around on the surface here without expending ammo or weapon durability, and with the rose regen I think I'm in a position to explore up here indefinitely and kill everything that I happen to run into.

I love this forehead laser! No ammo required!

I'm also picking up mementos out here, I don't see why you can't just make yourself really powerful up in the fields before venturing down into the Gut (except for the time spent doing it when you end up dying anyway - which of course I did. I will miss that head laser.) After obtaining the Head, my entrance back into the Gut is blocked off by a woman named Rose, who encourages me to go elsewhere.

She is not the subtle type

I suspect that I need to go into other entrances to get into different 'biomes' of the gut - it's been hard to notice because every biome is awful and oppressive, but there are things like cages, empty corridors, somewhere had a library theme. I suspect that there's once piece of 'She' per biome, so I'm going to stop going in the initial elevator that Rose is guarding and use some of the other entrances that take you to down to different floors right away. Down in the cages I found.... a movie theatre!

Is this the entertainment district?

There's even a movie playing but it's distorted and unintelligible. Two stars.

This band may not look good but when you hear them play you'll realize they also don't sound good.

I also found a couple 'meat cults' that show up randomly, there are these piles of meat hanging out in bleed or poison areas that offer you a chance to join them and become immune to that particular status until you die.

I always wanted to join a cult!

I've made an important discovery - the 'Gut' is a living thing that makes life harder for you if you piss it off.

Of course I discovered this by pissing it off

If this happens the game spawns more monsters (and once you get the last key for a level you have to run like hell because a horde is coming after you). On the overworld I found a tree that you can give gold to in order to make the Gut happy with you again.

It takes half your gold but hopefully makes my life easier.

This means that I probably shouldn't be playing this like an FPS where I kill everything, I should kill only as necessary and just work on making it down to the next floor - so long as I can complete a single floor in a run that's progress in the bank.

Many of my deaths are pretty much because I got lost, so I think the best weapon in the game may be the map

After a couple attempts at pacificism I don't think it works as well as I'd hoped - the monsters still want to kill you, the best way to survive is to kill them first, and the Gut doesn't actually get mad at you until you've killed quite a few of them. After dying more times to another boss monster named 'Meall' that was an awful grinding machine disguised as a wall, I finally got past it with judicious use of the map and managed to acquire the second part of Her - Her hand. Her's hand?

Other than being detached from Her body it's looking great.

Now that I have a couple of Her pieces, it's time I tried putting Her back together.

It's not going well

Back to exploring the Gut, I'm finding new things as I go deeper. Some of these discoveries are entirely unpleasant, such as the first time I picked up a note and it tried to bite my face off.

More like Blank Page Scared the Crap Out Of Me

Other things are positively delightful and weird, like an NPC that lives in a toilet and helps you out for some cash.

And incredible paintings!

I'm finding more survival strategies. Joining a status-effect cult has proven very beneficial in this run which has made me immune to the all-too-frequent clouds of poison gas.

I've learned that hoarding Gold is a terrible idea - there's too much chance of getting a 'gold-hunger' effect that just causes you to eat it all.

I've learned that I can shoot myself with a handgun with a regeneration effect and gain back more life than I lose by shooting myself.

Perhaps most importantly I've learned that the instances of 'Her' that I can find around the levels intermittently produce a regeneration effect, which means that if I find She / Her and there aren't any monsters around I can generally just stay there and heal back to full.

She is a welcome respite in a bleak place

I've also figured out that since the monsters go crazy and try to kill you when you pick up the last key for a level, so it behooves me to leave a key close to the exit elevator for last.

Overall Golden Light is very good at what it sets out to do, which is make you feel uneasy and frightened as you explore its unpleasant interiors. There have been several times when I have made it to safety by the skin of my teeth with a horde of monsters chasing me, and several others where the monsters cut me down before I could reach the exit.

And one time where a bunch of monsters all jumped me the moment I set foot in the level - I died fast

I do have a couple nitpicks. One is that the maps - especially the overworld maps - are (I suspect) intentionally difficult to read, and navigation for me has been exceptionally challenging. I constantly get lost if I don't carry a map with me at all times, which uses up one of my two weapon slots - I find I really need to have it handy to find keys. Another is jumping. This game has one of the strangest jump mechanics I've ever experienced, and I'm not a fan. Jumping moves you in a way I can best describe as 'swooping' in the direction that you're moving, except if you're standing still you 'swoop' backwards. On forward jumps I've sometimes managed to clear obstacles that appear much higher than normal jump height, so it's often not clear to me at a glance if I'm able to jump over or onto something or not. Thankfully there's no platforming required and it's mainly a dodge mechanic. My last little pet peeve is after you die sometimes the game starts you next to the biome entrance for the place you last came out of so you can start again, and sometimes it puts you back to the beginning so you have to walk back to it. I suppose I should still explore the outside area some more but the gist of the overworld is that it's got a few beneficial items in it but mostly exists so you can choose your entrance into the Gut. Somehow I've gained two permanent abilities, and I have no idea how (and one is Martyr which means I don't hurt myself if I hit myself which is an excellent ability). I've got one consumable item that claims it will let me keep a memento after death so next time I get head-laser I'm going to try it on that.

Rose has seen better days

I wonder if Rose is trapped here looking for someone, like I am. The dialogue in this game is intentionally incoherent so it's difficult to make sense of. After many attempts, I finally succeeded at killing the third boss, Gut Divers. I ended up grabbing a camera that paralyzes and poisons and using it to freeze him so I could riddle him full of Tommy gun rounds.

I've never been so happy to see a disembodied leg in my life.

The bosses drop unique weapons and uh.... there's pros and cons to this one. The good news is that it's indestructible and shoots fire. The bad news is... it's a Phallus.

I categorically refuse to eat this weapon, and not just because it's a good weapon. The next level set is hunting-cabin themed, with alternating hallways featuring snowy 'exteriors' and log-cabin interiors, though everything is still a maze of corridors.

Some of the deer heads on the walls pop right off and attack you

On rare occasions I'm finding Golden Amber, the item that lets me make an ability permanent. I used the first to get the head-laser so I always have a weak ranged weapon, and now I've used two more to lock in a nice combination of abilities - one causes me to not damage myself (much) if I hit myself, another lets a weapon pick up an effect from me when I hit myself, and the last one repairs the weapon if I hit myself.

Officially changing my name to Mr. Delicious

This means that I can now easily start runs with a weapon that never breaks that I can use to regenerate my health whenever I want, so I can top off anytime I find a safe area in a level.

It's particularly useful on a low-damage map but I can set it up on any weapon

The boss of the Cabin area is a beefy deer named Maneater, who I managed to avoid entirely on my second attempt and find Her second arm.

Four parts down, not sure how many are left

The levels are getting more elaborate and I need about six keys per level, but I'm making good progress with my handy self-regen - I can no longer suffer a 'death of a thousand cuts', which is usually what's been ending a run outside of the boss monsters. Speaking of boss monsters, the next one to bar my path is Castle, a huge figure carrying a huge sword and causing huge damage.

He killed me lots and lots.

I think he CAN be killed, but not by me. I eventually managed to sneak around him and find She's torso... and then the game threw me into a very strange vignette.

Some wheelchair-bound murder investigation that had nothing to do with anything as far as I can tell

Golden Light is an exercise in horrific absurdity. Everything is meat, you eat weapons, my most successful strategy is to find a safe area and hit myself with a map every so often.

Let he who has correctly assembled a dismembered woman cast the first stone

The next area appears to be corridors of madness, wall after wall are lined with notes.

There's some nasty enemies wandering these hallways

I've added some speedy abilities to my list of permanents, including one that makes me super short and run around like a dog, so screenshots from here on are going to be from a low perspective. On one level I managed to have one of my minions survive all the way through, and it made getting the last key and getting out trivial.

Just keep carrying that key all the way to the door buddy! Who's a good eye-taker? You are!

The boss of this level set (the pattern is three levels per area, third level has a boss that makes your life miserable) is Scourge, some sort of wizard with a sword.

I lucked out here - I teleported right next to it and then Scourge didn't move while I lasered it to death.

Scourge dropped the 'Meatnomicon', which is a spellbook that inflicts random status effects. It's great - most of the boss weapons are - but I died two floors later and lost it, and I don't think it's worth the effort of replaying earlier levels to try to re-obtain them.

Scourge was guarding her Heart! The last part!

All right, one Heart, one Head, Torso, Two Legs, and a Hand - that's like 95% of a woman, I think we're good to go. Good news! I put Her together and she looks a lot better than you'd expect!

Bad news: A tower of arms appeared and a bike whisked her away into the sky.

I followed her up to the sky jellyfish Meduse which took me to the final set of levels.

Did I mention the game was absurd?

My self-regen setup got me through the initial levels with a lot of time and caution, but the final boss, Gutworm, was a hell unto itself. Unlike the other bosses there's no hiding from him, he goes right though walls and chases you constantly.

He barged into the starting elevator and ate me

After a couple failed attempts to kill him followed by many failed attempts to try to find all the keys while he was chasing me, I finally got fed up and managed to play 'Ring around the Rosie' with a spear until Gutworm was dead.

It didn't end well.

One of the ways writing about games has changed the way I play them is that I'm more consistent about finishing them, because I want to finish out the story and make a complete entry.

Golden Light has multiple endings (indicated by an achievement and the rather depressing final page that you write), but I will end my time with it here. This is a difficult game, and playing it is highly stressful and utterly exhausting. I have to constantly be on guard against ambushes and random horrible sound effects and in all honesty if I were not blogging it there's a good chance I would have moved on sometime around when I was being cut in twain by Castle, and I am most certainly ready to move on now that I've beaten it. That said, Golden Light is an impressive game, it is well designed with a lot of interesting strangeness to it, and being able to acquire permanent abilities over time makes it more of a roguelite instead of a roguelike - I doubt I'd have had the personal fortitude to beat this game without them, but at no point did they make the game anything I'd consider easy.

If you want to see something weird and scary, Golden Light delivers.

Also, I'm pretty sure She cheated on me, that bitch.