Gameplay Basics: Dropping Lights

As you progress through the cave, you will have to manage the lights that you’ve picked up. As you hold them, their power drains. If their power is completely diminished, they will disappear from your inventory automatically. For example, if you don’t have any lights to keep your Fortitude up, then the player character will become too frightened to go on. It might make sense to first put the light down and regain your Fortitude completely.

Originally, it felt like an oversight: if the player could refill their Fortitude to maximum whenever they had a light, wouldn’t that break all the puzzles? Luckily, I barely have any puzzles planned out since I’m still fleshing out the core gameplay. After thinking about this “hack” it made sense to include it as core gameplay mechanic going forward instead of an “oops.”

Since this mechanic may not be immediately obvious, it’s a good candidate for a tutorial-via-gameplay section. Imagine a stretch of cave that’s too long to progress through while holding the light. If you drop the light halfway through the corridor, you can restore your Fortitude to max before picking it up and moving on. After the player makes it through this section, they will be poised to expect more puzzles with this going forward.