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Probably via some grotesque mutant orifice.
How to describe Golden Light? It’s the roguelike first-person shooter James Davenport memorably summed up as «prop hunt in an infinitely sprawling office building meat maze from hell.» More recently, in her celebration of ugly games, Nat Clayton called it «disquietingly meatcore».
Golden Light is a game where you descend through the levels of a fleshy construct called the Gut, which is equal parts Silent Hill office space and cannibal nightmare. It’s a game that lists among its features: «Things you can eat or throw in this game: Bat Head, Corrupted Fetus, Fish Head, Fat Lips, Meat Apple and many more!»
Whatever this baffling horror-shooter really is, you can now experience it in its most horrifyingly feature-complete form, as Golden Light has now hit version 1.0 with an upsettingly wet splat. It’s available on Steam with a 30% launch discount, and is further discounted in two bundles. The Go to Hell bundle collects it and retro FPS Ultrakill, while the Taste of Madness bundle combines Golden Light and Cruelty Squad, one of the most offensive-to-the-senses games in recent memory.
«This is not a game for anyone expecting something conventional or easy to slip into,» James said of Golden Light back in 2020, «but for me (and I’m still pretty early on) I love kicking around in queasy, resistant games like Golden Light. And while maintaining tension, mystery, and a sickly unease is paramount here, there’s still a game under that heavy blanket of thematics, and one I’m slowly beginning to understand even if it resists me at every opportunity.»
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was published in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did play every Warhammer videogame.
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