Lantern Hollow has always felt like a game from somewhere around 1999. As of alpha v0.0.10 it is set there too.
Ten finds from 1999
There are things out in the woods that someone dropped on the way through: a tape player with the cassette chewed right through, a handheld with four flat AAs, a phonecard with twenty units left and not a phone box for miles. Ten of them, scattered further and further from camp — three in the first ring for night one, the rest out where the fire has to grow before you can reach them.
None of it is any use to you. Press use on a find and your wanderer stops for a moment and thinks about it, which is the point. The Found page in the pause menu keeps a list across every run, so pushing out to the far rings is worth something even after the fire goes out.
A bar and a bag
Six numbered slots always on the bar, with an empty hand when nothing is picked. Find a backpack in the woods and you get a bag behind it; a bigger one adds a second row. Press I, the left trigger or the bag button to open it, lift a stack with one press and put it down with the next, or drag it with the mouse. Everything stacks only so high, so a slot is worth something. Your weapons live in whichever slots you put them.
Play it on a CRT
Settings, then Video. Scanlines, a phosphor mask and a flicker at four strengths, and a shape option that bows the whole picture into the glass — corners and all — on the desktop build. It sits over the menus too, the way the games this is remembering were seen.
The woods in 3D
Every trunk clears your head before the canopy starts, no two trees are the same height, and the small canopies fill out. You face the way you walk, each view remembers its own zoom, and the mist ends the world at whatever your fire can reach.
Also
Raw meat is raw now — eat it and it turns your stomach; cook it on any lit fire, twice as fast on the barbecue. The HUD is drawn at your screen's real pixel density. And the studio is Ikigai Game Studios, on the splash and everywhere else.
The full list is in the changelog. New screenshots are on the screenshots page, and the build is waiting on your download page. The free alpha still closes on Monday 21 September — £4.99 keeps every build coming after that.