P1: Anchor Light review – An anomaly hunting game for Bioshock fans

The original Bioshock was brilliant, wasn’t it? And what really sticks with me to this day is its setting. Whether it can be considered Steampunk or Dieselpunk, I’ll leave others to argue about, but it’s a fact that the underwater city of Rapture captured the imaginations of many and really enhanced the game. Perhaps with that in mind, and with the next Bioshock game some time away, developer Deadbolt Interactive has gone with a Rapture-esque theme with its latest game, P1: Anchor Light. Gameplay-wise it’s nothing like Bioshock, but it might keep fans occupied for a short while.

P1: Anchor Light is one of the latest flurry of anomaly hunting games to hit PC and consoles, and as such its premise is simple. Inexplicably finding yourself in a lavish lighthouse that seems to be holding a dark secret, you have but one goal: ascend its stairs, check its rooms for anomalies, then go through the correct door. Get it right a number of times and you’ll eventually reach the top of the lighthouse and will be able to shut it down. The problem is, with the lighthouse shrouded in darkness and anomalies coming in many varieties, it’s not an easy task.

Like nearly all anomaly-hunting games, it can be hard to work out what you need to focus on in P1: Anchor Light. Needless to say, it will take a few attempts to ascend up the lighthouse to find your feet, working out what anomalies you can expect. There aren’t many rooms here to keep track of, but with everything being so dark it can be hard to spot certain aspects that might be different on a subsequent visit. Ultimately, you’ll have to rely on your instincts. While sometimes an anomaly might be blatantly obvious, like everything being upside down, other times it might be something simple like a shelf being out of place.

For the most part, then, this is an anomaly-hunting game like any other, only with a somewhat unique setting. But there’s one aspect of P1: Anchor Light that makes it stand out from the crowd, perhaps for better or worse, depending on your preferences. Basically, it incorporates musical statues into its anomaly-hunting action; you’re required to stop moving and remain motionless when the old-fashioned music playing throughout the lighthouse abruptly stops. On PS5, you can take this to the next level by enabling the motion sensor in your controller. The mic can be enabled to detect noises, too, which will also cause you to fail.

On the one hand, it’s a nice touch, making P1: Anchor Light stand out a little from the crowd. On the other, however, it adds an additional layer of difficulty that doesn’t always feel fair. You’ll know when you’ve failed as a diving helmet will descend upon the screen as you’re offed by some fearsome entity, but sometimes it’s a little too keen. There are some areas to explore where you can’t hear the music quite so clearly, and it can be truly frustrating to make it through eight or so loops of the lighthouse only to move for just a fraction of a second too much when the music has stopped and have your run ended because of it.

There are some other things that players might take issue with when it comes to P1: Anchor Light as well. There are no graphical modes on PS5, for example, so you’re stuck playing at 30fps. There’s no way to adjust brightness in-game, either, so unless you change the setting on your TV you might find the lighthouse too dark for your comfort. If these things don’t bother you, though, and you get on with P1: Anchor Light’s mix of anomaly hunting and musical statues, there are multiple modes to tackle here, including an endless mode with a leaderboard. It’s not the best example of the genre, but it’s still worth considering thanks to its budget price.