Beautiful Light's mix of STALKER and Hunt Showdown is masterfully eerie, but I do wish it wasn't an extraction shooter

Why did it have to be tacti-cool?

The obvious way of bundling up Beautiful Light is probably "Hunt Showdown meets S.T.A.L.K.E.R.", and whoops, I've already committed to that in the headline. But the first game that came to mind when I chanced on some playtest footage last night was The Town Of Light, LKA's deeply disquieting game about exploring a carefully recreated abandoned asylum.

There's the title overlap, of course - it's always a bit of a provocation when horror games make a point of being well-lit. Beyond that, the two games share an interest in dessicated interiors where chairs huddle disconsolately, where the sun slides through windows whose curtains have rotted away, and the plaster flakes in ways both pretty and macabre. But where The Town Of Light gave you one rambling building's worth of encroaching hallucinations, Beautiful Light gives you a whole wilderness, where the architecture scales from "dreary forgotten school" to "gleaming underground base". It also gives you a lot of guns. Devised by Geneva-based Deep Worlds SA, this is a team extraction shooter where six squads of three gasmasked alpha-bravos compete to retrieve an artifact from a quarantine zone full of deadly anomalies.

If you have any familiarity with current market trends, that last sentence may have put you to sleep. I, too, feel my lids drooping at the thought of yet more tacti-cool shenanigans. I'd love this to have been an open world ghosthunting sim. But going by the pre-release playtests I watched, Beautiful Light seems pretty accomplished as big map bang-sneakers go. The UI relies on diegetic elements - your character has a fancy wrist screen with various tabs, and you can use computer terminals in the world as well, which reminds me of GTFO.

It seems like scouting and visibility are far more important than firepower - there's no easy enemy tagging system, so it's all about combing the skyline for silhouettes while steering clear of flat, light-coloured surfaces. The Chornobylike ambience is nicely tuned for camouflage operations, with lots of thick, browning foliage, scrap metal and weather-beaten concrete. Sometimes, it evokes Modern Warfare 2's legendary All Ghillied Up level.

Too many references! Sorry, I've just had my coffee. As regards the Hunt Showdown comparison - there don't appear to be as many low-level zombie-style enemies as in the Crytek game, so it's more about the PvP. The "twist" is that one player can take control of a higher-level anomaly. There are six to unlock and pick from. The one they're currently showing looks like a skinless deerhound with a chestful of mantis legs.

Beautiful Light feels like a game that I will, at minimum, dip into cautiously around release day, before the community get too good and/or toxic. Again, though, I do wish this setting served a different purpose. Perhaps they could rent it out to The Chinese Room. You can read more about Beautiful Light on Steam - there's no release date yet.