Dead Beacon Reviews

A spectacular survival horror game that should've been algorithmically served up to me when it was released. I literally hunt games like this down and didn't find it until over 2 years after its release! Wearing inspirations like a coat, Dead Beacon is an unabashed copycat of my other favorite indie survival horror game Nightmare of Decay. Everything is working great. + The controls are good. + Enemy design is varied and satisfying to shoot. + Mansion design is compelling. + Puzzles aren't braindead but don't feel like a chore. + There's almost no music but it's ok because the atmospherics are eerie and soothing. ++++++ Brilliant map that lets you mark all over it. My complaints are mild. - the enemy grabs feel disorienting in a sloppy-not-scary/exciting way, and pressing L/R to break them feels even worse. Wish there'd been some kind of knife pickups like in Resident Evil that let you get away free but the item breaks. - the guns are nice but I wished to upgrade all of them. Normally I am pretty vicious to survival horror games without NG+ or unlocks, but this one gets a pass. It's 5 dollars, it's spectacular, and it has the amazing map. Developer is working on some kind of GTA/Doom/StardewValley amalgam and it looks really cool but I sure hope they return to survival horror and include NG+ unlockables/challenges next time!

It's very basic.. as one would presume from the screenshots. What eventually drove me to put it down was the miserably slow speed of your character. What makes this worse is that the run button doesn't improve this much. I pretty much held that button down (Shift key) the entire time. Why not just allow me to toggle on "always sprint" if the base speed is going to move that agonizingly slowly? That alone wouldn't solve the problem though. The run speed also needs to be a little bit faster for this to feel better to play. I noticed a stamina meter appear in a boss fight (perhaps it was appearing in every fight and I just didn't notice though). In any case, during [i]at least[/i] that fight, having a stamina bar limited my ability to run. So I guess there are rare instances that utilize a need to not to be always running, but I didn't enjoy the encounter at all really, so I didn't feel like it had added anything when it did get imposed in this way.