Vanishing is the worst way to go. It’s the mystery that makes it terrifying. Little Lighthouse of Horror draws upon the unsolved case of the Flannen Isles Lighthouse keepers. They just vanished. So it goes in the game. It’s your duty as the relief keeper, to account for what has happened in your diary, as you comb the hillside, gathering resources to stay alive while keeping the lighthouse operational.
Little Lighthouse of Horror is primarily a resource management game. Most of what the player does is a balancing act between their character’s needs and resources. Between managing their own hunger, temperature, sleep, and sanity, they must also keep the lighthouse stocked in kerosene so that it continue its job of signaling sea vessels. Failing that, they will either die or be fired for doing a “deplorable” job.
The game is originally written in Spanish and has both charming artifacts and a few clunky lines in English as a result. More slickly defined, its monochrome pixel-art style creates a shadowy purple-gray backdrop for its survival and management games.
The island is defined by a few small areas. There’s the dock upon which we arrive aboard the vessel Princess Coral with a crane used to bring orders from the ship to the land above. From there, we jaunt up a hillside and arrive at a keeper’s house, along with a field of plants to harvest and a tree farm further uphill. Inside our humble new home, we have a stove to cook on, a bed to sleep in, a fire to warm ourselves by, and a chair to read away our dips in sanity. As we go through the home, the route takes us right to the lighthouse and a kerosene filling station. The lighthouse is multi-storied, its a trek up some staircases, and then we reach the top, where we can refill the lamp, and keep the light moving across the water to signal approaching ships.
Our job is mostly to survive and keep that lamp on when ships are passing in the night. This is as much about time management as it is resource management. The way we plan our setup, stocking the pantry with our plants and building bundles of firewood cut from the farm of trees, is what determines our success.
Each week, we can put in an order of three items: kerosene, groceries, and spare parts to fix broken objects. Strategic planning will give ample room for survival but it’s going to take some trying and dying to get there.
As our time as a lighthouse wickie goes by, our mental faculties begin to leave us. We are visited by ghosts, and are driven by them to find out what’s happening. Some inspectors will come visit us, a cat will eventually join us in our reading chair, and the plot will progress alongside days spent on the island.
Generally Little Lighthouse of Horror goes one of two ways. Either you’ve got everything under control or you’re just barely missing one of the meters for survival or lighthouse keeping and losing that way. Mostly it goes the second way.
The game, having just been released, is still plagued by little issues of horror. Your character gets stuck places and so do the objects you carry and place around the island. It’s elegant in its simplicity, so long as the lighthouse remains… a well-oiled machine. Eventually, small events on the island will stress each of your individual resources and continued success is just about solving for those situations.
Little Lighthouse of Horror is a charming and appropriately small game that initially does not feel very interactive but expands as soon as you realize how to manage your resources. Stick with it for a few minutes, and you’re likely to stay on the island for a good while. The simplicity of the game is the point and it delivers on the right-sized virtues of its small design.
Just don’t kill any seagulls while you’re out there. Bad luck to kill a sea bird.
Reviewed on Steam Deck (non-optimized)