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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Photonic Distress
GRIP420 · Published by GRIP420 · Official site ↗
Very Positive — 93% positive (58 reviews) · 25 achievements
Last updated 27 Sept 2026
Photonic Distress (or PD for short) is a blend of First/Third Person puzzler/platformer with a unique twist. Navigate your way through randomly generated levels, lighting your way up, fighting enemies, sliding and collecting Memory Fragments to wake up!
DJCTQ 12
£6.99
Lowest price we've ever recorded
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£6.99
Price history
3 Sept 2026Lowest: £6.99 · Highest: £6.999 Oct 2026
Action, Adventure, Indie, Casual · 2018 · More £5 - £15 games
Explore dynamically generated worlds in Photonic Distress, an indie adventure where you light your way through challenges and collect Memory Fragments to progress.
About this game
Photonic Distress (or PD for short) is a blend of First/Third Person puzzler/platformer with a unique twist.
You wake up in an internal representation of your conscience where your goal is to collect 100 memory fragments throughout increasingly complicated and increasing in size procedurally generated levels, or dreams. These levels are illuminated on easy and medium difficulties but dark on hard and impossible ones! You have a Photon gun that you can use to light your way up and fight enemies as you go through these levels. Initially this is only in form of colorful balls, or photons, that your shoot from your gun but ass you collect fragments, the upgrades will become available for you, such as a flashlight attachment, a scan grenade - that shows an outline of the world around you and highlights points of interest, as well as spawning/revealing unspawned/hidden enemies and killing the ones that are spawned. Once you collect 100 fragments the final room will open where you can go to end the game.
To provide maximum replayability, level generation is based of a Pseudo Random Number Generator. The seed you choose or randomly generate when starting a new game will dictate how your levels look, what they are made of, how many fragments you will find in each level and etc. This means that you can complete the game on various difficulties for the same seed, or various seeds for the same difficulty and every time it will look different.
PD features 4 difficulties: Easy, Medium, Hard and Impossible. Based on your chosen difficulty your gameplay may be quite relaxing as you quickly go through levels or very challenging - if you feel so inclined. On easy and medium difficulties the levels are illuminated! On hard and impossible you'll have to navigate your way in the dark, relying on your Photon Gun, Scan granade (Unlocked at 30 fragments) and of course your skill! The tiles that make up your level have a difficulty rating from 1 to 10. On easy, the difficulty rating increases slower, on impossible - every fast. As the difficulty keeps increasing you will find that the levels will be made up with tiles that are increasingly trickier. We have to admit higher level tiles give even the calmest of us an urge to smash something. Levels also gradually increase in size - more so with harder difficulties.
There is also an assortment of various barricades, traps and pickups that will also spawn for you.
Most of the music in-game was composed specifically for PD, by a very talented friend of ours, Toteki. However you are welcome to turn it off through settings and put some of your own chillout (or adrenaline pumped) music in the background. Overall we aim to provide a mystique filled ambiance with just the right challenge level for you to spend your time.
PD was made by a very small team. We are as indie as it gets. it's our first game and we sincerely hope it is worth your time and money.
You wake up in an internal representation of your conscience where your goal is to collect 100 memory fragments throughout increasingly complicated and increasing in size procedurally generated levels, or dreams. These levels are illuminated on easy and medium difficulties but dark on hard and impossible ones! You have a Photon gun that you can use to light your way up and fight enemies as you go through these levels. Initially this is only in form of colorful balls, or photons, that your shoot from your gun but ass you collect fragments, the upgrades will become available for you, such as a flashlight attachment, a scan grenade - that shows an outline of the world around you and highlights points of interest, as well as spawning/revealing unspawned/hidden enemies and killing the ones that are spawned. Once you collect 100 fragments the final room will open where you can go to end the game.
To provide maximum replayability, level generation is based of a Pseudo Random Number Generator. The seed you choose or randomly generate when starting a new game will dictate how your levels look, what they are made of, how many fragments you will find in each level and etc. This means that you can complete the game on various difficulties for the same seed, or various seeds for the same difficulty and every time it will look different.
PD features 4 difficulties: Easy, Medium, Hard and Impossible. Based on your chosen difficulty your gameplay may be quite relaxing as you quickly go through levels or very challenging - if you feel so inclined. On easy and medium difficulties the levels are illuminated! On hard and impossible you'll have to navigate your way in the dark, relying on your Photon Gun, Scan granade (Unlocked at 30 fragments) and of course your skill! The tiles that make up your level have a difficulty rating from 1 to 10. On easy, the difficulty rating increases slower, on impossible - every fast. As the difficulty keeps increasing you will find that the levels will be made up with tiles that are increasingly trickier. We have to admit higher level tiles give even the calmest of us an urge to smash something. Levels also gradually increase in size - more so with harder difficulties.
There is also an assortment of various barricades, traps and pickups that will also spawn for you.
Most of the music in-game was composed specifically for PD, by a very talented friend of ours, Toteki. However you are welcome to turn it off through settings and put some of your own chillout (or adrenaline pumped) music in the background. Overall we aim to provide a mystique filled ambiance with just the right challenge level for you to spend your time.
PD was made by a very small team. We are as indie as it gets. it's our first game and we sincerely hope it is worth your time and money.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
Minimum:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7 or Newer
- Processor: 3.0 GHz Quad Core
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1060 or better, AMD RX 580 or better
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Recommended
Recommended:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7 or Newer
- Processor: 4+ GHz Hexa Core
- Memory: 32 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2060 or better, AMD RX 5600XT or better
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Supported Languages
English*
*languages with full audio support
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Update 1.1!
Photonic Distress V1.1 This update is coming in hot with multiple new features and Quality Of Life additions/changes! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33021293/9e4ac62d70b6fa0cab7b5114be383796bd08b61f.png Lights ON! We've had a lot of positive feedback from players who loved the pickup that would light up the whole level. So now for Easy and Medium difficulties the lights will be always on! Don't worry though, your Photon Gun is still very important (see below). If you are a hardcore Photonic Distress player, you'll be happy to know that the darkness is still there for a challenge in Hard and Impossible modes! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33021293/4d34be86b1a67dd3c89f595afc54fac268e02851.png You will now encounter enemies as you go through the level! They are not spawned initially and will only spawn when you get close. Shoot them with your Photon Gun or blast a scan grenade to kill them. Scan grenade also makes them spawn earlier, so be sure to throw it ahead to reveal/spawn enemies! Follow up with another one to kill them or shoot them from afar once they have spawned. Different enemy will have a different effect on you, some of them push you, some of them shock you and the red guy straight up kills your character with his projectiles! Speaking of projectiles, you can deflect an incoming projectile if you shoot it with your Photon Gun. In short these enemies bring a lot of fun and excitement that was missing before! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33021293/1a72421656e80fd119376f0a9b00860c75aaef99.png To make it more enjoyable for everyone we've added checkpoints that will spawn along the way as you progress! No more running all the way from the base. You will now respawn at the checkpoint if you fall off or get killed by an enemy. Of course you can still teleport to the base (if you need to use the Photon Generator for example), and if you have a checkpoint there is a handy new portal on the starting island (there are starting islands now btw) that will take you to your latest checkpoint! {STEAM_CLAN...Read full article on Community Announcements (GRIP420)Patch NotesOfficial
Photonic Distress Hotfix 1.0.2.1
PD Hotfix 1.0.2.1 is up. - trap spawn to often on desert arc tile - music in main menu - some loudness adjustments Special thanks to @Djembe for Bug discover and Video report.Read full article on Community Announcements (|DD|Spaehling)Patch NotesOfficial
Update 1.0.2 is out now!
Hey everyone! Here's a changelog for the update: January 30, 2019 V1.0.2 Changelog: - Fixed Mouse Invert not working - You can now bind the 3 shooting modes to any other button - Fixing hard-coded wakeup room minigame shooting input, it will shoot on same keys as the Photon gun - A few new procedural tiles and fixes to existing ones - Added V-Sync option - Added FPS limiter, adjustable between 30 and 240 fps - Repositioned NPC in Temple 02 To see past changelog please click hereRead full article on Community Announcements (GRIP420)AnnouncementsOfficial
GRIP420 Discord and Twitter
We have a Discord server! You can also follow us on Twitter @GRIP420Games! We promise to leak juicy pics and gifs of our upcoming titles! Also please reach out if you are a streamer and would like to stream PD and/or want to do a giveaway!Read full article on Community Announcements (GRIP420)Patch NotesOfficial
Update 1.0.1 out!
Hey everyone! November 6, 2018 V1.0.1 Based on community and streamer feedback the following changes have been made Changelog: - When talking to tutorial characters, you now need to press Interact (Default E) to go to the next page. This eliminates discomfort for fast readers and lets players dictate the rate at which the text changes. - Fixed inconsistent Photon spawn location when shooting (especially when looking down) - Added "Duck Jump" step to tutorial, since many players didnt figure out that it provides an advantage and some tiles can only be traversed using the "Duck Jump" technique - Air control! More players expressed the desire to have some degress of control while airborne (jumping). Air control ratio is now set at 0.4 of regular walkspeed while in air. No more narrowly missed jumps! You can adjust enroute. - Updated some tutorial texts - Photons scaled down by 20% - Pickup Location fixed for a couple of scaffholdings - Fixed a trap that could be bypassed by walking around it on specific tiles - Photon generater stops charging the gun after it already has 10k Photons. Vocal notification when this happens. ("Maximum Photons collected") - Photon generation amount in Green Room is now different based on difficulty: Easy 500 per collection Medium 300 per collection Hard 200 per collection Impossible 100 per collection Each collection still adds 10 seconds to your overall time - Collision fixes on moving plattforms - Collision adjust on a couple of jump locations - Replaced the "wallhack" flower/twig that showed up in darkness. You can also see the previous changelog here!Read full article on Community Announcements (GRIP420)
