☣ DEADLIGHT C64 ☣

The grid is dead. The dead got up with it.

An original game for the Commodore 64, written in 6502 assembly.

You are carrying the only light left.

The room is already there. You just cannot see it.

☣  THEY ONLY MOVE IN THE DARK

Catch one in your beam and it stops where it stands. Hold the beam on it and it begins to burn — green, then yellow, then white, then nothing at all.

So the flashlight is your eyes and your only weapon, and it points one way. Light the path ahead and everything behind you wakes up and starts walking. Light the pack behind you and you go forward blind.

WHAT YOU LIGHT, YOU HOLD. EVERYTHING ELSE WALKS.

☠  KILLING THEM COSTS YOU SOMETHING

A burning one bursts. What is left on the ground is toxic and green and it eats you if you stand in it. Kill carelessly and you poison your own way out.

You are not completely blind to them. Anything within about a body length shows as a grey shape even unlit — a shoulder, a lean, an arm coming up. Further out than that, the night still has it, and you will hear it before you see it.

▣  12 POWER UNITS. 2 IN EVERY ROOM.

A generator. A battery rig. A lantern. A floodlight. A road flare. A valve wheel.

To bring one up you have to stand still on it — and standing still is the most expensive thing you can do here. Your beam is pointing wherever you left it, and everything outside it is moving.

Get a room's power on and it stays on: a lit pocket of ground, which is also ground the dead cannot cross.

☣  6 PLACES, & ONE WAY OUT

A field. A junkyard. A graveyard. A military base. A highway, and a sceret room.

Boomstick...  Say no more!

There is a medkit crate  — a white beacon in all that black, worth finding before you need it.

Then it is fuel, then keys, then the car on the highway. The keys are never in the same place twice.

DRIVE OUT AT SUNRISE. DO NOT LOOK BACK.

▚  WHAT IS IN IT

• Six hand-drawn locations, every one of them black until you light it.
• Ten zombie designs across two sets, with a graveyard pack that only ever comes up down there. You read each one by its posture — lean, stance, arms — because in the dark a silhouette is all you get.
• A bestiary in the menu, so you can learn what is coming before it arrives.
• Original SID music — Last Light on the title, Horde under the game, typed in note by note. Turn it off in the options if you would rather hear them coming.
• A story page, full instructions, and a set of easter eggs for anyone who grew up on this stuff — the boomstick, the toxic drums, the thing in the sewer, the drive out at dawn.
• Kill statistics when you make it out, broken down by what you put down.
• Runs on a stock, unexpanded C64.

☠  CONTROLS

• Joy2/Keyboard Controls
• Stick — move, and point the beam. Eight directions.
• Fire — the shotgun, once you have it. Fire or space confirms on menus.
• Walk onto a power unit and stand still to bring it up.
• Walk over the crate, the shotgun, the fuel and the keys to take them.