Light & Dark
Games
Mario
Limbo
Diablo
Undertale
Mario uses light and dark via different levels throughout the game, mostly through the dark being castles with the main enemy's in the game, it has lava and black buildings and walls to show the player it is an evil zone
Mario also uses light themes throughout its game through different starter levels, a lot of these being the lighter more friendly themes like hills and forests with lush greens and bright blue waters, and as it goes on you end up further and further into the darker theme of evil. |
Undertale uses both light and dark themes in its games through different clever methods in its levels, a lot of the time it shows light and dark on the same screen, (as the entire game is in black and white) but despite how unsaturated the game looks, you can still tell if the level is portraying an evil theme or a light one.
Diablo uses a variety of different methods to show light and dark, and similar to Super Mario, it shows the theme of dark instead of being just a dark black room, but with clever uses of darker shades of colours and darker reds. This is really effective in the games because usually people associate red with evil, but its also using lots of dark colours like black and darker greys.
Limbo is similar to Undertale, in that it shows off the black and white theme of light and dark, creating a really nice atmosphere that really draws you into the virtual world. Limbo is played entirely in black and white with small shades of grey, and explores a light concept of a forest combined with some gruesome deaths and a trial error type gameplay.
Cuphead
Cuphead has a really interesting way of showing off the light and dark theme, as it doesn't really use colours to show off this theme like Undertale and Limbo does. Cuphead takes some really quite innocent characters and gives them darker intentions. You will encounter different animals, people, plants and foods to fight called "bosses" which are basically stronger enemys with 3 different stages depending on how long you are fighting them for.
Cuphead is really good at showing the light and dark theme, as it glorifies the darker intentions of the characters you play as. For example, there is a flower that has nice yellow bright petals, it starts off looking friendly with bright colours, but ends up as a flower with thorns all over its stem, long teeth and giant eyes whilst trying to kill you.
Celeste
Celeste is a newer game released only a few years ago, it uses a variety of different themes to really show off the light and dark theme. The main way I noticed watching an IGN review was through the use of backgrounds and making darker subjects light to fit the theme of a brighter more happy environment. For example, in the darker more intimidating areas it has lots of black and grey, with spikes that kill you, however in the lighter areas they still wanted to include a way to die, but spikes wouldn't fit the theme, so they went for bright magenta crystals on the floor that really fit the theme, but are also extremely deadly.
Colour Schemes + Palette
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Red + Blue
Opposite colours, grey + white
Black and White
Gold, White, Grey / Dark red, Black, Darker grey, steel silver
Undertale
Darker red, just to keep from having light blue and light red
Inmost
Uses darker colours for most of the game, and uses lighter grey colours for ease of access for the player to be able to tell where their walking, as well as being able to tell where they can and can't jump too.
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Dark + Moody environments for most of the game.
Lonely + Quiet
Enemy entities are all black, which creates a light/dark atmosphere to the game.