Grave: Are you afraid of the dark?

When was the last time a match saved your life? Unless you’re Bear Grylls, the chances are that you really just use them for lighting candles when the power goes down. In Grave,a single match will be the difference between life and death.

Survival horror games are everywhere now, so it takes something special to stand out from the crowd. Grave’s hook is that the enemies you’re facing can’t stand light in the day time you’ll need to find as many supplies as possible, and possibly even shelter, because in the night, the enemies will come. But
they’re not just zombies or ghosts. These enemies are psychological projections that will literally disappear when they enter a well-lit area. If they run at you, you’d better not fumble with the torch for too long.

Rather than dropping you into a randomly generated world, Grave mixes things up instead of a randomly generated playspace, every player will start in the same world, but when it gets dark that world will shift and evolve. By the time the sun comes up again, you’ll look around and the landscape will be completely different. Setting up camp and waiting it out just isn’t an option here; you’ll need to be constantly on the move to survive.

“Setting up camp just isn’t an option, so you’ll need to be constantly on the move to survive”

These two elements really do offer some intriguing options. If you find a petrol can, you can drop a circle of kerosene and light it to keep you safe for a few more minutes. Come across a generator hooked up to lights and you can be safe almost all night. But if you only find matches, or a battery for your torch during the day, the night is going to be a frantic sprint through the world as you look for somewhere you can defend yourself. You might find a good place to hide, but without exploration you’ll run out of supplies and then things will start to get tense. 

We’d be lying if we said we were excited by every survival horror title we see, but Grave looks like it has some really great ideas for keeping the game fresh during every day/night cycle. The title was funded through Kickstarter last year, and currently doesn't  have a solid release date aside from  ‘2015’. We’ll be keeping an eye on the title to see whether it can realise its potential when it goes live through the ID@Xbox program later this year.