It’s been almost 20 years since Team 17, the developer of Worms, was publishing games. They’ve broken their long walk in the wilderness to bring Light to the market. Originally meant to be a short experiment, Light gained a following on Steam Greenlight, popularity that pushed the team to take their game to Kickstarter. A quarter of the way towards their goal they were contacted by Team 17.
Light’s a top-down 2D stealth game where you’ll be breaking into banks, assassinating targets, stealing documents, and planting evidence. It looks a little like Monaco, although it doesn’t feature a monkey.
Have a look at its minimalist visuals here:
The crisp look of the game is certainly inviting but there’s currently little complexity to its mechanics. You walk up to doors and sometimes have to press ‘E’ to open them. Likewise, hacking is simply holding down ‘E’ while a progress bar travels to 100%. At which point you are able to click ‘Unlock’ on doors and ‘Disable’ on security camers. On that level, the hacking doesn’t look too satisfying and acts only as a delaying tactic for a player progressing around a map.
However, in the demo you also get to play around with avoiding guards and this is a little more involved. The guards have a wide vision cone and will hone in on you if they catch a glimpse of your blue square body as you sneak about the level. If you aren’t able to see a guard directly then they’re represented by a red blinking dot that moves through the level. It’s a nice visual touch.
We must also keep in mind that the game is still very early in development and the systems in place are more representative than anything. Hopefully future updates will show a more complex game.
Light took to Kickstarter back at the beginning of September. Looking for £20,000, things were getting a little dire, having only raised £5,600 by 6 October, four days before the funding campaign was due to close. At this point Team 17 stepped in, offering “to fully fund the development of Light”.
The Kickstarter page, its pitch video, and the demo the developers provided during the campaign are all still up to be looked through:
In a statement sent to GamesIndustry.biz, Team 17 said that they’ve returned to publishing because they have “an incredible community running into many millions that we can cross-promote within and raise awareness for new IPs and specifically indie games, which are very close to our hearts and something we stand up for”
Hopefully this is a sign that they will be picking up more small projects like Light. Another publisher is no bad thing, especially one looking to fund the type of projects we’re seeing more and more of on the indie scene.