Ever since the release of Vampire Survivors back in 2022, there has been no shortage of similar games, a style now commonly described as the survivor-like shooter. In this already-saturated market where we see a new game just about every couple of months, studio Mirari & Co. has decided to toss its hat into the ring with the release of Dark Light: Survivor. Despite its seeming similarity to others in the genre, however, Dark Light: Survivor isn’t nearly as derivative as you might think. Instead, thanks to its strange melding of modern-day technology with typical medieval fantasy elements, we get a few unique ideas to play around with.
The premise of Dark Light: Survivor is quite simple. At some point, horrific creatures started coming into the world and essentially drove humanity to near extinction, and in the process, also fractured the universe. The few humans that survived this event were able to discover “celestial quantum technology,” which they then used to create the Phantom Train, allowing them to travel through the multiverse. Your job, as one of the so-called Dark Hunters, is to travel to the different realities in the multiverse and take down the biggest demons.
And that’s all you really get from a lore perspective. There aren’t really any collectibles to find that will flesh out the different realities for you, and even the characters themselves don’t really have any story arcs that will have them evolve as people over the course of the game. More than anything, the story here simply exists as an excuse to throw you into some weird places and have you fight a variety of enemies, be it zombies, ghouls, goblins and giant spiders.
"More than anything, the story here simply exists as an excuse to throw you into some weird places and have you fight a variety of enemies"
In gameplay terms, Dark Light: Survivor revolves around using your weapons to kill hordes of enemies that drop exp. Picking up enough of these will cause you to level up, which in turn will get you access to new abilities that can either be simple upgrades like more health or damage, or more interesting ones, like a shoulder-mounted turret that spams poison grenades in random directions. While this might sound familiar to you if you’ve spent any amount of time playing games like Vampire Survivors, the twist in Dark Light: Survivor is that you also happen to start out with a pair of weapons of your own, which you manually control.
Regardless of your choice of the three playable characters, you will enter a run with one melee weapon and one ranged weapon. While both provide more active gameplay than the genre typically offers, giving you more to do than just walk around and watch things die, they also introduce entirely new avenues for mid-run upgrades for your characters. The default melee weapon, typically a low-damage sword, can be swapped out for a slow-but-deadly Zweihander, for example. Similarly, the tiny pistol you start out with can be replaced with an Uzi or an assault rifle. The presence of these weapons and their respective upgrades does a lot to make up for the fact that your magical abilities can’t really be combined to create something more interesting.
Dark Light: Survivor also has three distinct meta progression tracks. One revolves around finding and spending Voidstones, which can only be earned by beating mini-bosses and final bosses across the game’s three levels. These Voidstones are used to unlock more characters, new weapons, new levels, and even items to use for the second main progression track: runes. Depending on how well you do in a level, at the end, you will return to base with a bunch of runes. These aren’t really that complicated, essentially giving you a way to start out with a preferred weapon and get some minor stat boosts along the way.
The third, and most impactful progression track is the skill tree. Each one of the three characters has their own distinct skill tree, where you can spend the money you find by playing the game to make them stronger in incremental ways. The melee-focused knight of the Order of the Sunken Light, for example, has all of his skill nodes revolving around boosting his melee damage and defenses. On the other hand, the gunslinging Void Operative gets better ranged damage, movement speed boosts, and even ricocheting bullets. The magic-using Dimensage focuses more on elemental damage right from the get go, foregoing the need for more mundane things like hitting things harder with a stick.
Along with these passive boosts, all of the skill trees also have a few active abilities to unlock. However, while it might be tempting to unlock all of these as soon as you possibly can, you can only really equip a single active ability at any given time. Using the knight as an example, I had to make the difficult choice between getting a Shield Bash that can stun a big group of enemies, giving me some breathing room during large hordes, or getting a set of magical swords that spin around me, attacking enemies with reckless abandon. Both abilities were fun to use, and essentially changed up my entire approach for the respective run.
The general minute-to-minute gameplay of Dark Light: Survivor is largely quite engaging and fun, and I only have minor complaints, with the biggest one being a lack of readability when hordes get massive, making it difficult to distinguish between enemies so you know which ones you should stay further away from. Another complaint I had with the game is the fact that, when picking up new weapons, you don’t really get enough details to make an informed decision about whether you should switch out your old one. While the game will tell you that your pistol does, for example, 100 DPS, the new revolver you found has its damage listed as 90, and the lack of an equivalent DPS stat for the new gun makes it quite confusing. Mitigating this, the UI also has up and down arrows that indicate whether something is an upgrade or a downgrade. However, that feels like a band-aid solution at best, and the overall UI/UX needs some refinement.
Aside from that, the only real criticism I have about Dark Light: Survivor largely stems from a general lack of content. There are only three maps to fight through, and once you’ve wrapped those up, there’s little to pull you back in unless you completionist compulsions. However, it is an Early Access game, and the studio has noted that it plans to stay that way for between 1 and 1.5 years, which means there will be plenty of time for the development team to add in more levels. The concept of traversing the multiverse has left plenty of potential for Dark Light: Survivor on the table, and it would be a shame if the studio weren’t able to make full use of it.
"The only real criticism I have about Dark Light: Survivor largely stems from a general lack of content"
Ultimately, as far as Early Access releases go Dark Light: Survivor is one of the better ones out there. Sure, it might suffer from a lack of content, but that’s only really an issue at launch; the studio has already confirmed that it is working on adding more levels. Aside from that, the only real quibbles I had with the game largely came down to a need for refinement. If you’re a fan of survivor-like shooters, Dark Light: Survivor is definitely one game you’ll want to keep an eye on.
This game was reviewed on PC.