It all started with a lighthouse. I was much younger at the time and after purchasing my own state-of-the-art PC running a Windows 95 OS and Pentium 1 chip, I was ready to take on the world of PC gaming. One of the first games I had purchased was brand new, called "Lighthouse: The Dark Being". In the game, your character goes to the neighbor made scientist who lives in the Lighthouse, on the island, and in clear view of your living room window. Upon entry you find a dark being taking the baby child of the scientist and then jumping into a portal. Your job is to find out how to open a portal using the scientist's machines, to enter this other world, save the baby, save the scientist, trap the dark being and get back to your world.
As cliche as that sounds, it is well known now in the world of gaming, that lighthouses are seen as locations that hide or show hidden passages or portals to other worlds. In the game "Myst", the lighthouse is where the power generators are for, Stoneship Age, and is required to bring light (both metaphysically and physcially) into the location to solve the puzzle and get the pages. The well known cliche of a lighthouse being a portal or a gateway, stems from a dialogue line in the third Bioshock game, released in 2013:
"There's always a lighthouse. There's always a man. There's always a city,” Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, one of the main characters in the third game of the series, has some omniscient knowlege of the series, breaking the fourth wall, and mentions that the isses always start with a lighthouse, a man and city. The first Bioshock game was about a man who wanted to escape the communist government of his homeland Russia and builds an underwater city, where creatives and makers can do what they want, without any obstacles. He builds a lighthouse, on the surface of the water, to act as a beacon to those who want to enter his utopia. The inside of the lighthouse has a miniature submarine which will transport the rider, under the sea and to the underwater city: into another world.
The second game used the same lighthouse and in this game you play a character already inside of the city and you wish to escape. At the end of the game, your escape pod is floating alongside the lighthouse, which lights your path back to the surface world. The third game starts off not unlike the first game with a lighthouse that takes you to another world; this time a world in the clouds on a floating city. However, unlike the previous games, the third game of the series has the characters become aware that they represent one version of an infinite possibility of themselves, through parallel dimensions.
The concept being that each of us travels to a lighthouse, it is there that we go do a different world, experience something new and then become changed for the better for it.
I just recently played an older game, from 2012, on Steam and the game was called "Dear Esther". The game has multiple interpretations to the story and the developrs did this on purpose as to not explain and leave the player to come up with their own conlusions. Each game play is different and there are super natural elements in the game as well. However the game does start with a character from a shipwreck, to a seemingly deserted island, with a lighthouse. In this game, the player plays through the main characters emotional state as he slowly decends into depression and suicide. All of this forshadowed by the fact that the lighthouse on the island, has the stairs destroyed, which stop the player from ascending to the top where the light is at its brightest. This game has such a gripping story that you can feel it afterwards and it could be seen that it was created and written in such a way that the lighthouse in the game, is there to allow the player to experience a new world and be made better for it.
That last point also reminds me of a game called Rime, which also had a lighthouse in the game. In this game, just as Dear Esther, it involves a spiritual path through the lighthouse. The main character of Rime is a young boy, washed upon the shore of an island. As you explore the island, you find a large lighthouse and once inside, you see that the entrance where you came into, is the top and you must decend down a winding staircase. Along the way down, there are 5 portals or doorways that take your character to these other dimensions. Only while journeying through these portals do you see that your characters to traveling through the 5 stages of grief. At the end of the last stage and the last level, your character becomes a glowing orb of light and the entire world turns upside down (literally, in the game!) Every level and every passageway is now turned on its head and you run up the staircase that you previously went down, to a blinding light at the top. This game makes you watch cutscenes and initially believing that your character was moving through stages of grief from the loss of your father. But in reality, it was YOUR character that had died and you are moving through your own stages and your own spirit has to come to terms and accept your own death. This was another game that stuck with me on my bones. It surely may have made me a better person for playing this one, both starting and ending with a lighthouse.
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