Beautiful Light anomalies: how the playable monsters work

Anomalies are the reason Beautiful Light is not just another extraction shooter. They are the monsters of the raid, and six of them are played by people.

What an anomaly is

A Beautiful Light raid holds 24 players: six squads of three operators, and six anomalies. Instead of joining as a member of the Quick Reaction Force, an anomaly player drops into the raid as a monster. Deep Worlds describes it as invading other players' raids.

The AI anomalies are a separate thing: they are the game's PvE threat, present on the map and dangerous to everyone. The player controlled anomalies sit on top of that layer, and they think.

How an anomaly wins

Operators are there for the artifact. Anomalies are not. Their job is to hunt, kill and eat the humans so that nobody gets out with it. The Steam page frames the raid as a race between two outcomes: the artifact is extracted, or the humans are all dead.

That gives an anomaly a completely different way of reading the map. The artifact is still the centre of the raid, but for a monster it is bait, because it is where the operators will go.

Progression: eating is experience

Anomalies level up on a track that is entirely separate from your operator's. Eating players earns experience, and that experience is spent on:

• Improving the anomaly's skills
• Unlocking new abilities
• Unlocking new monstrous anomalies to play

So the more you play the monster side, the more of the monster roster opens up. Nothing you do as an anomaly is described as feeding your operator's progression, or the other way round.

What ships at Early Access

The December 2026 Early Access build includes 1 playable anomaly and 4 AI anomalies. The full release roadmap lists more anomalies, without a number or a date. Check the release date page for the launch window.

Why this page has no anomaly names

You will find anomaly names on other sites. Deep Worlds has not published a roster, a list of abilities, or even the name of the anomaly that will be playable at launch, and the press coverage we checked does not name one either. Rather than repeat names that may be wrong, we leave that part blank until the studio confirms it, the same rule as the redacted section on the home page.

When a name, an ability or a counterplay pattern is confirmed by Deep Worlds or visible in official playtest footage, it goes here first, with the source and the date.

How anomalies change the operator game

Even before any abilities are public, the design has consequences for operators:

• Noise matters twice, because some of what hears you is a person, not a script
• The artifact is where operators converge, which makes it where anomalies wait
• An AI threat can be learned; a player controlled monster adapts to how your squad plays

For how this compares with games where every monster is AI, see Beautiful Light vs Hunt: Showdown.

Sources

• Beautiful Light on Steam: the raid composition, the anomaly objective, anomaly progression and unlocks, and the Early Access content list