Our independent highlight pick for this week goes to Impact, developed by the studio Cave Light.
Impact is a brand new third person game that takes place inside a long and dark abandoned factory. Players take control of a loader robot and must make physical impacts to light up the world around them to solve various puzzles and platforms. It features a visually intriguing under-glow art-style that makes the world look truly unique and astonishing.
Impact’s core gameplay revolves around highlight objects in bright colours using vibrations. These vibrations are caused by impacts – such as jumping, clapping or stomping. With every step taken, small impacts are created to allow players to see objects immediately surrounding them, which assist in traversing the factory.
However, the players also have the ability to make larger impacts that reveal more of the world around them. This however is limited to certain directions. Once certain aspects are revealed, the player can interact with movable objects, find hidden clues and jump between otherwise hidden platforms. All of this comes together to create an overall wonderful gaming experience that is truly unique to Impact.
I’ve had the pleasure to interview Cave Light’s Team and Design Lead Tanner Goldsmith about Impact, and how a dedicated team brought an idea to life. The game has been in development for over 8 months now – and nearly half of the time was spent on taking an idea and expanding on it.
“The original pitch for the game that we originally signed up for was a game where you could only see when you’re in the air. When you jump you have unlimited vision, and you kinda had to plan ahead and return to the ground where everything goes black.” Tanner explains. “We’ve kinda evolved that core concept into now jumping is the thing that gives you sight, rather than having sight while you’re jumping”.
Tanner goes on to explain “Creating a experience of 15 minutes of fun or amazing and awesome is 10 million times better than 3 hours of average or eh…” It was very important to the team at Cave Light to deliver a more enjoyable experience focused on fun, rather than making a longer game that drags on for the sake of length. “It’s way better to have something that’s really awesome to the core every second that you’re playing it. We call it awesome-per-second.”
It’s safe to say that the primary focus of Impact is to be as fun as possible. You can view the trailer for the game below:
Impact launches on Steam on April 30th, 2020 and is completely free. Be sure to check out the game on Steam, and visit Cave Light‘s Twitter page for even more content and news following Impact.
You can find the rest of the interview with Tanner Goldsmith on The Noble Core Podcast (EP #14), currently streaming on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!
For more reviews and gaming news you can keep up to date at Informed Pixel. Want to speak to the team and interact with other gamers? You can do so over on the Informed Pixel Facebook page or on the Informed Pixel Twitter account.
