Genuinely very spooky. A little moon logic-y with some of its beating and a little empty in its more surreal presentation, but deeply compelling for much of it and generally very enjoyable. Certainly atmospheric throughout and it's hard not to feel sucked into this intimidating, slowburn experience.

Truly the first “hark” type game

Slow paced creepy adventure with beautiful art (if you are into the low poli PS1 visuals) and excellent sound design.
Game does much better in the first half, when you are alone on the island doing mundane chores while slowly descending into madness.
The second half kinda lost me, didn’t love the change in environment and some of the more action-oriented sequences felt out of place.

Reminded me a a bit of another exceptional indie horror game, Mundaun.

Well, the title is a lie.

And if you think i'm spoiling anything - the game pretty much shows you at the beggining. You play as a new lighthouse keeper after the last one mysteriously vanished. Now, it's easy to compare this game to the movie The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, but there are clear differences between the two. First off, this is more lovecraftian inspired and goes later into different places entirely and secondly, the movie focuses on two characters, isolated together and going increasingly mad, while in the game, it's only your character and possibly something else, which remains unseen for the majority of the game.

However, like in the movie, you're going to take care of the lighthouse up, day after day, until the certain point, which i won't spoil. For the most part, it's explorative horror adventure game kind of thing and i thought that more ominous things will happen as it goes on and yeah, they will, but also i get the sense that the game shows it's cards too early. Which is a shame because otherwise the horror aspect is well done. The PS1 styled visuals add welcomed uncanniness, the eerie ambient soundtrack and sound design will surely give many people goosebumps and there are moments where the atmosphere is so heavy, that it's suffocating.

so aside a single gripe, it's an great one. Might not be for everyone, since it is very arthousey, kinda slow and gets quite confusing in the second half, but it will pull you in and won't let go until the end.

I've been on a horror kick, and with a name like No One Lives Under the Lighthouse - an obvious misnomer, as something or someone does indeed live under the lighthouse, and is actively toying with your own interactions with said lighthouse - this one seemed like a solid step into some low polygon-horror. While No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is a short and relatively repetitious experience, leaning into some older mechanics for more than the aesthetic experience in such a way that isn't advantageous, it is one that keeps its horror understated and without an overt amount of cheap scares. It works, and made for a spooky experience that I played through twice.

No One Lives Under the Lighthouse has you as a brand new lighthouse keeper, fresh off the heels of the previous keeper's disappearance, and tending to the lighthouse invites the game's main sense of horror. There is, clearly, something watching you, on your heels (during one sequence, rather literally), interfering in your daily sequence of events, including re-fueling your tin, manually cranking the lighthouse, putting said fuel in the lighthouse, etc.. It's not a mechanically complex experience, but the routine of it invites the idea that it's a task constantly made more difficult and sinister by the malevolent force that largely stays unseen in the first half of the game.

Low music cues and a lack of jump scares means the horror is more about changes in the environment, or distant banging, or the subtleties of how the creature is interacting with you. Combine this with a really ambiguous narrative, and you have a game that is both repetitive in its design but also diverse in its type of scares. Those scares do diminish as the game goes along, and some terrible controls ruin a few sequences, but the overall mix of what No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is going for works. There are some action sequences but they are extremely limited and mechanically frustrating, but the game keeps the focus primarily on horror.

The visual design of the game hearkens back to the PS1 era, and it works, strangely; the game's sense of light and dark works well with the lowered resolution, especially knowing that very few times something actually jumps out of the dark - instead, it's just something to walk into. There are times that small details like the fuel pail are hard to see against the grainy backdrop (it actually caused me to blindly wander around or twenty minutes in the beginning of the game), but for the most part, you only have a set amount of actions to take and places to go (the island you partake in is quite small, being from one end to the next in under a minute). No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is essentially a two hour experience, but with there being additional endings based on finding a few items, I tackled it more than once and got to piece together some kind of narrative, one I had to Google right after playing.

No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is the kind of game that looks and feels like it under-punches, and that might be true in a few areas, but genuinely works for its going for. It may be cheap price-wise, but it's not cheap horror-wise, and that makes for a more fun experience as you are wandering just what the Hell actually lives under the lighthouse.