Horror games are supposed to be dark. Just not this dark.
Something was wrong
After a round of changes, an entire zone started rendering either completely black or strangely overblown, depending on where you looked. Lights were placed correctly, materials looked fine in isolation, and yet the scene felt dead.
Chasing the wrong suspects
We checked the usual culprits first:
- Post-processing volumes fighting each other.
- Light layers and culling masks.
- Baked lighting that had gone stale.
None of them explained it.
A single zero
The real cause was hiding in the environment settings: Environment Lighting Intensity was set to 0. With no ambient light at all, anything not directly hit by a lamp fell into pure black, and the exposure tried to compensate by blowing out the rest.
Darkness in horror should be a choice, not an accident.
What we changed
We set sensible values for the sky, equator and ground ambient colours, plus a shadow colour that keeps dark areas readable without killing the mood. Now shadows hide things on purpose, which is exactly what we want.