Deadlight is set in the Pacific Northwest in 1986, in the midst of a societal collapse due to, they're referred to as "shadows". They swarm towards any live body they detect, but at a shuffling gait. They moan and take a lot of bullets (or strikes with an ax) to put down. They're zombies, but apparently zombie movies aren't a thing in the world of Deadlight.
You play as Randall, who has hooked up with a ragtag group of survivors, but I can't remember what any of their names were. No, wait, I think there were a pair of sisters, and the one that didn't die in the opening cut scene was Stella. Maybe. You know what? It doesn't matter, because they get split up at the beginning, and Randall doesn't really care anyway. All he wants to do is find his wife and daughter, who he somehow got separated from when they left their little town and headed towards Seattle for safety.
The game is a side-scroller, with lots of platforming. You spend most of your time trying to get Randall from one place to another without him dying. Jumping across gaps, climbing ladders or across convenient pipes attached to the ceiling, stuff like that. The game doesn't give you a lot of time to deliberate how to get where you're going, sometimes none at all. At one point you sprint Randall across rooftops as an attack helicopter swings past trying to machine gun him. Leaping to fire escapes, clambering into open windows, then dashing through office space and smashing through weak doors or vaulting obstructions. Take too long, you'll get killed. Later on, you smash through a rotted door, but have to keep moving as the ceiling begins to collapse. You have to wall-jump to scale one wall, then tuck and roll and dive out another door before you're crushed.
(I will note here I frequently failed at the 'without him dying' part.)
There's a little bit of shooting. Mostly when you need to clear a horde of shadows from your path, but occasionally other humans, and sometimes to shoot a lock or plank that's holding a window closed so you can jump out said window. You have to scrounge for bullets, though the game will put a gear symbol on the screen when you're next to something you can interact with. It may be a lever, or a shelf you can block a door with to slow pursuit. Or it may be a pile of trash to search through. Or a corpse, which I suppose could qualify as "trash" by this point in things. That's where you tend to find bullets.
(Also driver's licenses and other stuff Randall collects in a sort of scrapbook, which seems really creepy.)
Like with The Fall, aiming is handled with the right joystick, which isn't so bad when shooting shadows (who tend to come straight towards him, heads perfectly level with his sight.) When you have to start angling up or down to hit some piece of the environment it got trickier, for me, at least. Especially when it's got to be done in a hurry, before you're overwhelmed or shot by soldiers. Overall, those parts have the feel of a lengthy quick-time event, minus an actual prompt to push a particular button.
During the game, Randall has the occasional flashbacks to when all this went wrong. Specifically, to him rushing home to his wife and daughter. No points awarded for guessing the big reveal late in the game about what really happened. It does, combined with the pages of his diary you somehow find scattered across miles of city and countryside, make me wonder just how long Randall's been crisscrossing these places.
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