This SCP-ish extraction shooter is already terrifying me
I t’s not hard to see Beautiful Light’s influences: the extraction shooter owes a debt to horror fan film SCP: Overlord, but in play the objective-based extraction shooter plays a little like Hunt: Showdown, as several teams compete to get their hands on an artefact and hoof it to extraction before you get mauled by the numerous mutants.
This always starts with your team finding one of the laptops to generate your own keycard. Players can generate a keycard at any time, but it only works for them. Hacking is done in real-time on the actual computer screen and my teammates, devs from Beautiful Light creator Deep Worlds, tell me it’s based on a real programming language. It’s lightweight but still feels like a real achievement as gunfire rattles in the background and violence – either actual or implied – is constantly just a few seconds away.
Then you push towards the high-security facility, fairly safe in the knowledge that every other player on the map will be making their way there or, worse, are already secreted inside one of the facility’s blind spots or dark corridors. Firefights ensue, and are instantly lethal: a clean round to the head or a burst of gunfire to the body will end most battles.
We played with three teams of four, while the finished game is aiming to include six squads in each match, but there was still plenty of fighting. In the early phase, everyone is searching for their nearest laptop, and there are enough of them scattered about the place that teams felt quite distant, but inside the facility there’s close-quarters combat the whole way through as everyone comes together for the same prize.
A CLEAN ROUND TO THE HEAD OR A BURST OF GUNFIRE TO THE BODY WILL END BATTLES
PLAYED IT
PvP combat with military weapons in run-down urban environments will sound like a similar experience to its extraction shooter cousin Escape From Tarkov, but Deep Worlds is describing the game as an objective-based extraction shooter in which loot is secondary to the artefact itself, and this gives it a distinct feel.
