In The Lost Night, you’re a spirit trying to get home, but evil beings are trying to drag you away to an awful fate. Unless you blast them to pieces, I guess.
I’m constantly impressed with what certain developers can do within the constraints of engines like PICO-8. It’s a deliberately restrictive engine, with colour, content, and resolution restrictions, yet developers like Mario Carballo and Joven Paul can come along and build something like The Lost Night – a cool, Halloween RPG complete with a very fun shmup combat system – with it.
Firstly, before all else, The Lost Night‘s world is fantastic. There’s always a temptation to go with either birds-eye or side-on view when creating a game. However, the developers opted for an isometric view, and also created a world full of both tall and short buildings and objects. Something about it reminds me of SNES games, although the resolution (and colour palette) is much more restrictive. As you float around this world, everything feels incredibly alive (including the spirits) as all of the enemies and people have idle animations, so they never seem like part of the scenery.
When you do interact with a monster, it whirls you away to a combat screen where the enemies (because you can fight multiple at once) have an easy-to-read health bar that indicates how close they are to being cleared. Under that, there’s a small section where you move your character around, shooting bullets at representations of the enemy that arrive there. It’s a little bit shooter and a little bit Centipede, but the fact that each enemy has a different pattern is very fun, and means that as the enemies get stronger, you at least have that knowledge on your side. It’s all wrapped up with some fun NPC chatter, a few fetch-quests to open up new areas, and also a level-up system that’s tied to spending candy on vending machines which, in turn, boost and increases your stats.
The Lost Night feels feature complete and in-depth, and perhaps, most importantly, it’s entertaining. It was created as part of the important Indie Bundle for Abortion Funds, but is well worth checking out even if you missed it in the bundle.
The Lost Night is available now (for whatever you wish to pay for it) on itch.io.
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