Lights Out: Forgotten Past

About Lights Out: Forgotten Past

Lights Out: Forgotten Past is a psychological horror game developed by Masefield Games and released on September 13, 2025. It casts you as an electrician responding to a routine job fixing a faulty apartment light, but things quickly spiral into surreal dread. Set in a decaying residential complex, the game blends environmental storytelling with first-person exploration. Strange noises, flickering lights, and fragmented memories push you to confront personal trauma while figuring out the building’s dark history. With four endings tied to player choices, it’s a short but tense experience designed to linger. Perfect for fans of slow-burn horror and narrative-driven puzzles.

Gameplay

You navigate the apartment as an electrician, using tools like a multimeter and flashlight to solve basic electrical puzzles. The core loop involves exploring rooms, documenting anomalies in a journal, and avoiding or confronting entities that trigger jump scares. A sanity meter depletes as you hear whispers or see distorted visions, forcing you to retreat to safe zones to reset. Each playthrough branches based on dialogue choices and item collection, affecting which of the four endings you unlock. Controls are tight but linear, emphasizing claustrophobic corridors and dim lighting. Sessions last 2, 3 hours, with frequent respawns if you fail to avoid threats. The horror stems from psychological unease rather than gore, relying on silence and sudden noise to unsettle players.

What Players Think

PlayPile users rate it 4.3/5, praising its atmosphere but criticizing brevity. 68% of players complete it, averaging 2.5 hours. Community moods highlight “tension” (72%) and “isolation” (65%), with mixed reactions to the jump scares, 38% call them effective, 22% find them cheap. Critics at Destructure and PC Gamer note the “elegant use of environmental storytelling” but compare it unfavorably to longer titles like Layers of Fear. The $19.99 price point aligns with its short runtime, though 45 achievements add replayability. One user review: “A punchy horror experience that’s more thought-provoking than terrifying.” Another: “The endings don’t justify the replay.”

PlayPile's Take

Worth playing if you crave compact horror with narrative depth. Its $20 price matches its 2.5-hour runtime, and the 45 achievements incentivize multiple playthroughs. The electrician premise is clever but underexplored mechanically, and the sanity system feels more punitive than intuitive. It’s not a genre-defining title but succeeds as a polished, unsettling experience. Skip if you prefer action or open worlds, but grab it for a night of quiet scares and moral dilemmas.

Storyline

You are an electrician. You have been called out to some apartments to fix a light. You arrive, but strange things start to happen. As the night progresses, you remember things from your past, and the dark secrets of this place.