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David Pittman's follow-up to Eldritch isn't a sequel. It's an inversion. Eldritch was an action roguelike that dropped you into a world built of procedural mayhem and oddly appealing Cthulhian horrors. Neon Struct is a stealth game in which no element of the environment has been left to chance - and its horrors are entirely human. "Eldritch for me was a lot about taking all the lessons I had already learned from my time especially at 2K Marin," Pittman tells me as I play through an early three-level build of his latest game. "I programmed AI for BioShock 2, and Eldritch was my version of doing a BioShock kind of game. I had a very short space of time to make it and so I did everything that I already knew how to do." He pauses. "For Neon Struct I'm actually trying to expand a little bit beyond that. I want to try and tell a story that's a little more meaningful. I want to learn about level design."
One thing both games do have in common is the very basis of their aesthetics - even if the whole thing's been warped in a very different direction this time around. Eldritch used metre-long cubes to cobble together dungeons, sand palaces, and a terrifyingly complex library that remains one of my favourite hub worlds in any game, ever. Neon Struct still uses the same building blocks, and it still sets its sights on an architecture of fear, but it's the kind of creeping fear that can occasionally take hold while walking Washington DC's National Mall on your own - the fear that comes from exploring a place that resembles a college campus designed by the secret police. "I was reusing the voxel engine that I made for Eldritch," explains Pittman, "so everything was going to be cubes and right angles and things like that. I was looking at what sort of architecture I could do that would look natural built from that sort of thing. And there's a style of architecture called Brutalism - big shapes, poured concrete. It's simple but it's imposing and it does have that sort of mid-20th century government building feel to it. Especially in the US. It feels kind of terrifying."
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