Basically, in Dark Light you take Hunk from Resident Evil, give him a katana and a bunch of guns, a ghost and lift jump from Destiny, let him space stomp like Isaac from Dead space, and set him out against a dark, sci-fi occult world to uncover the secrets of humanity's ruin.

Sounds good, right? Even in early access, Dark Light is a fantastic-looking, imaginative game. It's falls into the metroidvania genre, but cuts closer to Dead Cells with handmade map design. There is an intent focus on combat with a very high skill ceiling, with abilities meant for kicking ass rather than solving puzzles. You got high tech alternate-reality guns, swords, knives, and more, with hidden weapons derived from bosses, a classic "dropkick" style attack, a destructive dash that slams foes around, and a challenge present in managing these with rolls and parries to create openings in your opponents or to even send them soaring to their death. It can admittedly feel a little rough at times around the edges, with enemies and situations occasionally getting fiddly, but at its core Dark Light is excellent at combining the aforementioned attributes into a brisk rhythm for the player to discover.

The game's art style uses high definition pre-rendered graphics evocative of the PS1 era, with blackish hues balanced by intense teal, green, red, and orange highlights. Expect to see cybernetic and occult themes, with wires, robotics, and skull motifs everywhere, classical statues of angels and knights, dragons, powersuits, giant wasps, laboratory horrors, and more. It succeeds enormously at presenting a richly detailed apocalyptic cybernetic world reminiscent of darksynth album covers. The music in turn complements the art very well, and backs the intensity of the action and goes hard for the boss battles while maintaining a brooding ambiance when exploring the ruined and mutated landscapes.

Dark Light has a responsive and committed developer team of three adding features, squashing bugs, and filling in content on a reassuring schedule. What you have right now is a functionally complete experience that clocks in around 10 hours at the time I'm writing this. There's no ending yet, but it's still worth the ride and a good purchase if you're willing to support an indie game with a lot of promise. I at least recommend you keep at eye on it and jump in for its hopeful release at the end of 2021. Dark Light is already great and can only get better.