It’s true what they say: You don’t really know somebody until you’ve fended off monsters with them during a blackout on a space station. A new wave of co-op and PvP horror games have taught us a lot about the true character of our friends. Everybody a gangsta until the ghost in Phasmaphobia actually responds to your on-mic teasing, for example. And at least one person in your Steam friends list, it seems, has been training their whole life to be a serial killer in order to be this good at Dead by Daylight.
What Level Zero, an upcoming sci-fi horror PvP from DogHowl and tinyBuild, reveals is who’s cool under pressure, who understands teamwork, and who just absolutely sold you out, leaving you without light or protection from pursuing monsters.
Four ill-fated scientists find themselves in a real pickle in an inhospitable location (alien cave, space station, polar outpost), as scientists in inhospitable locations so often do. Not only is the electrical supply prone to station-wide blackouts, plunging their entire environment into darkness, they’re also sharing that environment with ruthless monsters who can see in the dark, are telepathic, and—worst of all—controlled by other players. The janitor here who was in charge of checking the fuse boxes really has a lot to answer for.
Visually it conjures Creative Assembly’s absurdly brilliant Alien: Isolation, with some impressive lighting effects drenching the space station in foreboding atmosphere and creating monster-sized silhouettes seemingly everywhere you look.
There’s also an intriguing array of gadgetry on display, from detailed floormaps on tablets to electrical repair kits used to restore the power and flares to light the way—or keep the monsters at bay.
What’s conspicuously absent, by contrast, is an arsenal full of assault rifles and laser turrets. Instead, light and darkness are the major weapons in Level Zero. For the team of four scientists, darkness obscures your path to the exit, hides enemies, and makes navigation next to impossible without teamwork and the judicious use of flares. Light, on the other hand, is unbearable to the team of two monsters, who can otherwise see perfectly in the gloom. Scientists can even set up arrays of motion-activated floodlights to blind their assailants.
Electricity’s the key resource in this 2v4 scrap, then. As long as the monsters can keep the lights off, they have the advantage. But with the power on and the station illuminated, momentum swings back those fleshy, fragile scientists.
And that central tension creates those revealing moments about your co-op buddies. Do they use a flare to light the way, ensuring safe passage for the whole team, or keep it in case a monster gets too close and they need to repel them?
Should the worst happen and you succumb to a monster while playing as a scientist, it’s not a total game over scenario. You can come back as a drone, a bit like Among Us's ghosts but with more agency. You can communicate directly with your surviving team-mates by pinging mission objectives, picking up monster trails with UV light or setting routes for your living colleagues to follow.
Level Zero is coming to PC in 2023, and the beta’s coming soon. For the latest updates, join the game’s Discord, wishlist on Steam, and sign up to the newsletter at levelzerogame.com for a chance to get a spot on that beta.
