Build 32 · Atmosphere & attack effects
Beta 32: The Night Gets Teeth
The lights still work. It is the space between them that should worry you.
Beta 32 brings a more unsettling night shift to Windows, Linux and macOS. Richer surface shading, dust in the light, low mist and more distinct pools of illumination give the compound more depth as the rounds grow darker. The Executive also has a sharper, better-timed claw swipe, and HR's scream effect now ends with her animation.
Updated for Beta 32: the Executive's trail now follows his right hand, with contact timed to that stroke. The footage below has been recaptured from the corrected build.
The cover is promotional artwork. The comparisons and footage below are actual, controlled in-engine captures.
Small shadows. More convincing surfaces.
Desks and fixed scenery now sit more firmly in their surroundings, with subtle contact shading where surfaces meet. Concrete, office finishes and roof equipment gain fine surface detail and more varied roughness. Restrained damp patches catch the light without turning every floor into a mirror. These are deliberately subtle changes: familiar rooms should feel more solid, especially as you move through them.
A darker walk between the lamps
The outer yard lamps cast tighter pools of light, leaving clearer dark intervals between them. One existing yard fitting now casts a downward shadowed beam on Medium and High shadow settings. Entry and route lighting keep their useful reach, and the existing night-time visibility floor remains in place.
Matching camera, field of view, round 24 and posed subjects. Before: the archived pre-atmosphere lighting review. After: the same review in Beta 32 with default Medium atmosphere and SSAO off. The lamp changes are part of the comparison; neither image has been brightened.
Nearby beams can pick out drifting dust. Patches of mist gather at the fence, steam rises from vents, and restrained ceiling shafts give working lights a little presence in the air. These effects stay local and fade with distance. A failing circuit can now send a brief dip through its connected lights; repairs cancel the dip, and a blackout still takes precedence over every decorative effect.
Hear the building around you
Quiet electrical hum follows working fixtures, and occasional metal-settling sounds come from the fence or roof. Failed supplies silence their affected hums. Everything comes from a place in the compound; there is no noise loop attached to your survivor. A separate Ambience slider lets you set the balance.
The Executive has claws
The Boss in the suit now leaves three sharp pink-red crescents behind his attacking right hand. Each stroke starts small after the pull-back, then grows as the hand moves. The leading edge follows his fingers while the tail stays at the start of the swipe, and the effect stays within melee reach. Its brightest moment lines up with the hit.
Repeated attacks restart cleanly, cold slows the gesture and trail together, and an interrupted swing cannot leave a delayed hit behind. The larger Executive variants use the same effect. HR's visible scream waves now stop when her scream pose finishes. Perk badges also have crisper enamel faces, metal rims and raised emblems.
Atmosphere with a budget
The new contact shading is baked, the material detail uses shared small textures, and nearby effects have strict limits. Dust and mist do not cast shadows or collide with the world. The claw trail uses one small unlit mesh. There is no new global volumetric fog, bloom or screen-space reflection pass.
Atmosphere has Off, Low, Medium and High options; Medium is the default. Optional screen-space ambient occlusion stays off by default because it costs more than the local effects. You can keep the baked shading without enabling it.
In one controlled 1080p office comparison on an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, the new default materials and effects added roughly 0.06–0.20 ms of median GPU render time. That measurement isolates that view and those effects; it is not a frame-rate guarantee for busy hordes or other hardware.
Get Beta 32
Download from itch.io or the website. Windows builds are signed by TSMW Development Ltd. Both download options use the same beta access key.
Get a free access key for seven days from first activation, and request an extension from your account if you need more time.