The Lethal Company developer's next game is an open world where you can't see

rockpapershotgun.com:

Lethal Company was one of last year's surprise horror hits. It was a brilliant dystopian scavenging sim in which you searched cellars for bolts while avoiding the attentions of creatures that hate being looked at, or which only move when they're not being looked at, or which look like your friends, from a distance. The developer's next game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is more about hearing. It's an "open-world, auditory text-based adventure" which mostly takes place in pitch blackness.

"You are lost in a nightmare playground of ideas," explains the Steam page. "This is an expansive, auditory feast of tragedy and terror. You must find a way out." From the looks of the trailer below, you'll do that partly by selecting text options in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure book. But there's definitely a navigable 3D world in there, made up of heavily pixelated objects.

Unlike, say, Perception, Welcome To The Dark Place doesn't appear to be a story about a person with a visual impairment. The "playground of ideas" bit sounds like a joke about the infamous "marketplace of ideas". I wonder if this will be in keeping with the whimsy of Lethal Company, whose "entities" are as silly as they are atrocious. That said, the Steam page cautions that "there are underlying themes of suicide and self-harm". Here are some moody snippets from the blurb:

#1: Three red blots mark liars.

#2: Food means depravity and death.

#3: No one leaves the forest where trees align.

#4: Don't listen to the wolf.

#5: Holes in suspicious places may lead to the Undergoing.

#6: Tellers of time...

[The corner of the note is torn off.]

All words to live by, I'm sure! Probably not for very long.

Welcome To The Dark Place was announced back in 2019, though it's news to me. I'm interested to know how the success Zeekerss has found with Lethal Company may have altered its direction. Anyway, you can read more on Steam and Itch.