DON'T LET HIM IN Floodlights Guide: Keeping the Lights On and the Creature Out

Floodlights are the house's fixed defensive lights in DON'T LET HIM IN, and the game's description gives both their job and their one condition: "Keep the floodlights powered. Watch the doors and windows. Restore the breaker when the power fails. Light keeps it away, but one vulnerable entrance is all it needs."

In practice, keeping defensive lighting useful all night comes down to two skills. The first is the scare-off response the tutorial teaches when the creature appears at a door or window: look right at him, shut the entrance, turn on a floodlight. The second is the restore routine for the moments the creature cuts the power and the floodlights die with it: wait for it to leave the house, go outside, flip the fuses back on, and watch for the on-screen power-restored confirmation. Do both and the lights stay useful until the tutorial's win line — "keep him out until 6:00 a.m."

What floodlights do

Floodlights are fixed lights on the house itself. They are not the handheld flashlight you carry — that has its own battery and its own flashlight guide.

When the creature comes to an entrance, the tutorial teaches a single response: "Scare him off. When you hear him at the door or the window, go scare him off. So, look right at him, shut it, and turn on a flood light."

1. Look right at him.
2. Shut the entrance — the door or the window.
3. Turn on a floodlight.

You operate the lights yourself during a run. In one game, a player watching the creature outside a door asked "Can I turn the light on here? Look." and switched the light on before driving him off. The tutorial also teaches the fallback for when a scare-off is not the play: "Hide in a closet. Don't let him see you get in."

Floodlights run on house power

Every floodlight depends on the house's power, and the creature attacks that supply directly: it cuts the electricity mid-run, and the house goes dark until someone restores it. It is not a one-off event. In a single night, one player hit two cuts — "AND he cut the power." early, then "Oh, yep. He cut the power." again later — and in a hard-difficulty run against The Boiled One, it happened yet again ("He cut it."). While the power is out, the floodlights simply do not turn on, which turns a routine scare-off into a problem you have to solve from outside first.

What light does to the creature

The game's description states the deterrent plainly: "Light keeps it away." One creature also gets a specific on-screen rule during a run: "The locust doesn't breach lit areas." That message names the Locust, and other creatures don't get a matching on-screen rule — so plan around the description's general "light keeps it away" rather than assuming every creature follows the Locust's message.

Recorded runs line up with it. When one player got the power back on during a cut, he noted that "when I get the power, he just disappeared." Against The Boiled One, a hard-difficulty player hammered the lights on and off while the creature stood at the door — "Turn it on, turn it on, turn it on... Turn it off, turn it off." The dark side of the same rule shows up in the game's official Facebook caption, which describes what happens "when the lights go out": the "monster got a good launch of the line and is right behind the player."

Two cautions keep this useful and honest. The tutorial never presents the floodlight alone as the fix — looking right at him and shutting the entrance come first, and the light completes the response. And "one vulnerable entrance is all it needs" cuts both ways: the creature "can reach the doors, windows, and even the second floor" (see doors and windows), so a lit front door does not protect an unlit window upstairs. Light is what keeps an entrance from being the vulnerable one — darkness itself isn't promised to summon an attack, only to invite one.

When the power fails: getting the floodlights back

Restoring light is a short, dangerous trip, and the order matters:

1. Recognize the cut. The house goes dark without warning — "Oh my goodness. He cut the power."
2. Wait for the creature to leave the house first. A player mid-restore spells out the gate: "He has to, he has to leave the house. He has to get out of the house so I can do this, man" — and later, "Once he leaves, I'll fix the fuse and then I'll head back into the house." The wait is the whole trick: one player who went for the fuses while the creature "was still outside" died before getting there.
3. Go outside and flip the fuses back on. "I had to go outside to flip the fuses back on."
4. Watch for the on-screen confirmation. Power returning is announced on screen — "Okay, power restored. Perfect."

Fuses are a limited consumable, not an infinite reset: "I have no more fuses. Oh, guys, my fuses are gone, man." A late cut after the supply is spent can leave the house dark with nothing left to flip. For the complete breaker and outage-recovery process, the power system guide covers it in full.

Keeping the lights useful until 6 a.m.

The recorded habit after a successful scare-off is to leave the lights running rather than save them: "I'll keep it on, man. I'm gonna leave these lights on." Late in a hard night, with fuses spent and dawn close, the same instinct holds — one player spent the final stretch trying to force the floodlights back on ("Turn on, turn on, turn on the floodlights") before the sun came up. That is the goal the tutorial sets from the start: "keep him out until 6:00 a.m." Light holds the entrances, power feeds the light, and the fuses you flip outside are what bring both back after a cut — manage all three as one night-long job.