“Chill” horror game LiDAR Exploration Program combines lasers with PowerWash Simulator vibes.

LiDAR or “light detection and ranging” is a way of working out and picturing the distance to an object by shooting laser beams at it, and timing how long it takes the laser to bounce back to the scanner. It’s been used for a bunch of Hard Science-y purposes, from mapping cave systems to measuring changes in the Amazon forest canopy. It’s also become popular among artists, who use it to create high-fidelity yet abstractly coloured and ethereal visualisations of, for example, rivers. Now here’s LiDAR Exploration Program, a “relaxing atmospheric horror” game from KenForest, in which you roam maps with a handheld LiDAR gun scanning the geography into being.

I’ve just been playing the Itch demo, and it’s sort of PowerWash Simulator but for ghosts. I’m assuming the game doesn’t physically calculate the passage of individual laser beams for the simple reason that my work laptop can run it without shuddering to pieces. Each level gives you a list of individual objects to scan. It certainly works as a chillout play: the landscapes appear to be wholly static, and you can take your time going over every surface, using the mouse wheel to expand or tighten the cone of lasers emitted by your gun. There’s an alt-fire on right-click which scans the whole screen from top to bottom. All very methodical and restful. But also unnerving.

LiDAR can’t reveal the interior of an opaque object, or anything behind the surface you’re scanning. As such, using it to explore a 3D environment involves the repeated discovery that any objects you’ve painted into existence are hollow when viewed from other angles. In encouraging you to hold yourself and the perspective motionless, the right-click full screen scan also subtly has you thinking that you’re printing out a 2D photograph, but then you move, and the flat illustration twitches into three dimensions.

I like the unassuming delicacy of these chills, the way they emerge ‘organically’ from the central conceit. There are more outright horror touches, mind you: the scanner is the only way to see, and sometimes, it reveals things you’d rather have left in the dark. There’s a top-down rotatable level map view on tab which somehow doesn’t quite ruin the mood. Studying my luminous forays from on high, I was reminded of Arnie following the Predator’s green blood through the jungle.

Still, I enjoy the demo more as an artistic tool than a horror game. I like narrowing the beams and drilling a density of detail through trees, then circling around to analyse the quiet violence of my vision as it spills out from more intensely illuminated surfaces, closer at hand, to stray puffs of photons in the depths of the forest. I wish more games drew this much attention to the properties of light. Find the LiDAR Exploration Program demo on Itch and Steam. KenForest’s other projects include Creature Packets.