Akemi Arlin Works Through a Two-World Alchemy Puzzle in Lighthouse of Madness

PIXELA PROJECT — Akemi Arlin of Pixela Project spent most of a Thursday stream on Lighthouse of Madness, a horror puzzle game in which the player is sent to a remote island to install equipment at its lighthouse. She opened the stream in a Halloween outfit that chat compared to an Azkaban uniform, and said she had picked the game because it leans toward puzzle-solving more than heavy reading.

The longest stretch came in a house on the island, where she had to mix chemicals that exist in two parallel worlds. Some compounds could be made in only one world, and warping between them drained her character’s sanity meter, so she talked her way through the recipe chain aloud. At one point she gave up on finding the recipe and tried combinations at random, and the pieces fell into place. A key from a ghost, a hunt for a bathroom that a clue pointed to, and a note describing a security pass code followed.

“The puzzles aren’t that hard. The problem is that it’s dark, too.” — Akemi Arlin, on the game’s lighting

By the second hour the game was wearing on her. She said the darkness and the motion left her dizzy and her head sore, that the puzzles themselves were not the main problem, and that she would turn to chat for help if she got stuck. Viewers called the puzzles too logical and said games in the Lovecraft mold tend to feel that way.

She then dropped the game and chatted. She showed a pair of wings she had found as a free asset for her model, and held up a prop that chat joked looked like a cigarette; she said it was a milk-flavor Pocky stick. She said she would be off Friday through the weekend, that work had kept her from a planned Halloween project, and that she had meant to build a haunted house in Minecraft. She also said she would test a heavy RPG-style mod with a friend over the weekend after it stuttered for her in solo play.

Late in the stream chat noticed her model looked soft at the edges. She said she had left a blur filter on every day without realizing it, and that it was straining her computer. She changed outfits, explained a hidden detail in her birthday costume, and signed off until the following Monday.