‘LIDAR.EXE’ Finds Frightening Things by Scanning Dark Worlds

LIDAR.EXE explores an eerie place where it’s far too dark to see. You have to use a scanner to look through your environment, but you might not like what you find.

It’s impossible to see anything in this game’s pitch black world. At least, not without the help of your Lidar scanner. This tool pings the area around it with a signal, indicating where walls, structures, and creatures were when you did the scan. This is a handy way of being able to ‘see’ what’s around you, as the signal remains as points of colored light on the object. As you scan multiple times, you’ll steadily make the world come into existence around you. It gives you some ability to get around, and the tiniest bit of comfort in a place where you can’t see ANYTHING.

But something seems to be down here with you. Errant signals show something humanoid seems to be skulking about. You’ll ping an area and see a humanoid shape that was standing there the moment you hit the button. Is it still there, though? And if not, where has it wandered off to next? The most your scanner can tell you is that it WAS there. So, even as you bring the world into existence around you, you’re still left in the dark, in a sense. You have no clue where the creature is – only that it exists. And that it was close to you a moment before. At this point, all you can do is keep exploring, watching the aftereffects of the creature’s strange behaviors as you move steadily deeper into this frightening place.

LIDAR.EXE does a fantastic job of letting you know, but also not know, about the thing that’s stalking you. You can get hints of its presence, but you’ll never fully know what’s it’s doing. You just get an afterimage of where it was, creating this sense of being disconnected and helpless as you watch it steadily grow closer.

LIDAR.EXE is available now on itch.io.

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.