If you go down to the woods today… you’re in for a fright
Radiolight is a single player first person thriller, developed and published by Kryštof Knesl. Set in the fictional town of Ashwood Creek in 1980’s America, you play as police officer Ethan Collins who is investigating the disappearance of a 14 year old boy in the national park, and the possible disappearance of park ranger Harvey Waters.
The game begins at your home. You wander around looking at various items and opening drawers to get used to the controls until you go into your daughter Mia’s room, where she will give you the radio that will become one of your main tools soon enough. After your conversation with Mia you hear the phone ringing downstairs, answering it will send you to the national park on the hunt for Harvey.
When you arrive at the visitors centre at the entrance to the park, you notice several things out of place and use your walkie talkie to report to Rob, your colleague. A prompt will appear on screen when you need to report something, usually over the item, but sometimes a speech bubble will appear in the top right of the screen to tell you to get on your walkie talkie. During conversations you will have multiple choices of response, you can only pick one to advance the conversation and there is a limited time to choose.
Once you are done looking around the visitors centre, you take the key to the park gate and enter the woods. Radiolight takes place at night and there are no lights in the wood, so you will rely heavily on your flashlight for most of the game, this helps make the world feel much bigger than it is. There is no map or compass to follow, but the game herds you in the right direction with natural barriers and the occasional sign pointing to certain places such as the rangers cabin or an observation point.
One area Radiolight excels is in its music, sound effects and its use of quiet environments. At times when wandering the woods, ominous music will start. With the low visibility due to the darkness and concentration of trees, the woods become very creepy, the sound effects make the game feel tense and you expect to jump out of your skin frequently, but the game doesn’t make heavy use of jump scares or gore, so when it does happen make sure you have a helmet on as you will hit the ceiling. I would suggest playing the game with headphones as it really enhances the experience and makes the wood feel alive, it also increases the tension you feel at being alone except for Rob on the other end of the walkie talkie.
Speaking of radios, you can walk around with yours on whenever you want and tune it to different stations. There is not much choice of what to listen to but there is a music station which isn’t bad, though I didn’t listen to it much myself as it seemed out of place to me in the setting. At certain points of the game when you tune the radio, the frequency indicator will turn red and a broken voice speaks to you. This voice reminded me of Bumblebee from the Transformers films in the way that it uses male and female voices for different words while speaking, what it says could be taken as a warning or a threat, you will have to find out.
The story is very well done, what starts as a regular investigation soon takes a dark turn (no pun intended) towards the supernatural. Radiolight is a slow paced game, but that suits well with the story it tells, and you get as much out of your own observation as you do from what the game gives you. There is little action in the game, and it is unlike anything I have played before, based on your use of your radio to tune to the right signal before shadowy creatures can get to you.
