Eyes in the Dark: The Curious Case of One Victoria Bloom is a fascinating roguelike adventure in which players have a unique weapon: a flashlight. Our young protagonist, Victoria Bloom, battles a series of terrifying shadow monsters as she attempts to discover the history of her family and the mysterious mansion they have built. Torch is an exceptionally versatile weapon player who modifies each run, upgrades the weapon to discover many combinations and handle the many opponents that await them in the dark.
We had a chance to sit down with the development team at Studio Under the Stars founder and director Vladimir Bogdanik and game designer Philippe Neduk. We discussed the versatility of the flashlight, how the team blended the three items in Victoria’s arsenal to complement each other, and the design of the Bloom family’s mansion. Be sure to read our review on dark in eyes too.
image from under the stairs
The flashlight is Victoria’s main weapon throughout her adventure and is something you adapt throughout your run through the mansion – although the flashlight was not an immediate option for Victoria. “We didn’t plan for it, we just jumped into it,” Neduk explained. “When I was drawing for the game, I was painting Victoria with a flashlight and she was breaking the darkness. It seemed like a cool mechanic at the time, and that’s when the lightbulb came on.” Eyes in the Dark was created during Game Jam, and at the time, the team thought of it as a puzzle platformer, but it turned out to be a survival horror game for a roguelike.
“We had a bunch of direction with Light being the main mechanic for the game,” Bogdanik said. “It used to be a lantern, torch, flaregun and matches. Eventually, as it evolved, we decided on the main three categories of flashlights for close-range, projectiles for long-range, and gadgets for increasing speed.
“We wanted the main weapon to be part of his character,” Neduk continued. “And then basically, why not use other sources of light and make the light a mechanic, which was stuff we put in the secondary weapon. Gadgets are just part of the story, with a whole lot of camouflage.”
image from under the stairs
These three tools develop as the player progresses in the game. Several upgrades are available for players to change, from the torch’s lightbulb attacks to how slingshot projectiles work. They don’t always get together perfectly, but this is the experiment the team wanted the players to experience and understand. “Really we want to emphasize this,” Bogdanik said, explaining how many unique combinations you can have with different upgrades and how no two runs will be exactly the same.
“The whole concept of our weapons and upgrade system is tinkering,” Neduk said. “It’s really thematic because Victoria is a tinkerer herself; plus, her whole family is based on scientists and tinkerers.” Tinkering is in Victoria’s legacy, and the development team wanted players to experience it through various upgrade possibilities, encouraging someone to experiment and tinker with these options as you progress through the Bloom Mansion. These customization options become available, progressing the story and unlocking the entire house.
Similar to tinkering with these upgrades, a player can customize how they progress throughout the mansion to determine the difficulty, a core concept the team thought of during the development process. “One thing unique to our sport is how mansions are generated,” Bogdanik said. While other roguelikes focus on a linear progression of levels, and they are always in the same order, the eyes do not share this linear progression in the dark.
image from under the stairs
Players can choose the sequence of zones they want to complete, and before each zone, they must select a perk and an obstacle before proceeding. These choices directly affect the game, such as increasing Victoria’s maximum health as an advantage or making enemies explode after dying as a hindrance.
“We were thinking about how to increase the difficulty of the game,” Neduk said. “Are we going to do it as the game usually does with each level getting more difficult? And we came up with the idea that players choose their own difficulty through perks and obstacles, and that’s really the mansion. Because of the layout.
There are nine areas within the mansion, each with unique enemies and bosses for players to defeat. While these enemies are an immediate threat, the home was also something the team wanted to explore and offer players – “the house is a character in the game,” Neduk explained. The mansion always lasts for a reason, and it is thematic as to why Victoria’s ancestors built it. This is his house.
“A lot of roguelikes have random level generation, and we didn’t want to feel like the levels were generated in a way that you couldn’t feel like you were in a real room,” Bogdani explained. Together by the team, it was predetermined to place windows in places where one would expect a window, and small details to make the home feel alive. These details required a lot of physical labor by the team.
image from under the stairs
The adaptation of Victoria’s Flashlight depicts the mansion itself, and players must consider their choices before proceeding to the next area. Unplanned upgrades and the game’s erratic structure make it problematic, but even if a run goes sour, returning to Bloom’s Mansion becomes a worthwhile endeavor.
Combining an ever-changing house with Victoria’s diverse weapons, these little details blend together in Eyes in the Dark – it’s what makes the game so exciting.
Asked about any content the team had to offer prior to the release of Eyes in the Dark, Neduk shared his desire to explore more items and include more variety for players. “We have a lot of them, but I wanted to explore more options. The way our tinkering is structured, it leaves us really open to a lot of things that we have time to explore.” It was not.
There may be additional content depending on the success of Eyes in the Dark, and Bogdanić is eager to explore more as the systems in Eyes in the Dark open up to weave in more upgrades and bosses. “Honestly, I think we just scratched the surface on some of these things,” Bogdani indicated. “There’s a lot of room to add more stuff.” With more ideas ready from the Under the Stars team, the future looks bright for Victoria Bloom.
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