Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut review – A love letter to Silent Hill 2
When it comes to mourning the loss of genre games, survival horror often tops the list. It’s trendy to rant about the state of modern AAA gaming, of the demise of Resident Evil, and to treat indie developers as the saviour of gaming. The same names are trotted out each time. Amnesia, Outlast, DayZ. All three are excellent indie horror games that duly deserve the praise, but end up overshadowing the more inscrutable titles that sneak under the radar.
Lone Survivor deserves its place on the list. It’s a game that hasn’t made much of a dent in the gaming consciousness, but that’s not for lack of quality. As programmer, designer, writer and composer, Jasper Byrne is a true renaissance man, sculpting his vision out of pure, gut-wrenching horror.
At first glance, Lone Survivor doesn’t seem to promise much. Its heavily pixellated graphics, enigmatic trailers and drip-fed plot seem to be straight out of the book of “Making a Cool Indie Game 101”. It certainly starts off in a rather conventional way. Your character is an unnamed hero in the aftermath of an unexplained apocalypse, waking up one day to find your supplies running low and the town’s denizens transformed into hideous monsters that are bent on killing you. You have limited ammo, a clumsy fighting style, and a protagonist who leans more towards everyday nobody than Bruce Willis.
As you play, however, the scope of the game seems much more complex. Mysterious NPCs will appear from time to time, some blissfully unaware of the state of affairs, some entirely too knowledgeable, and they’re quick to paint you at the heart of the situation. Much of the game takes place in your apartment building, a familiar setting that becomes more organic and hostile the further you progress. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Byrne has been influenced by one of the greatest psychological horrors of all time. Lone Survivor is Silent Hill 2 through a 2D lens.
The creatures you face are jerky, b-movie creations that lurch back and forth, and particularly like pitch black hallways and awkward spots just next to your exits. They bring to mind the monsters in old Hollywood films, with an almost unnatural stop-motion gait. This is made worse when they catch sight of your flickering torchlight and break into a run, screaming. The first time this happens you will likely wet yourself.
The aesthetic also has a crucial gameplay role. There are clues as to your state of health by the colour and quality of the visuals, and are triggered by several factors including your level of tiredness or hunger. As the game uses your apartment as a base, the game advances in chunks that are broken up by checkpoints, with your character returning to base after a certain amount of time. This is usually prompted by some need such as sleep or a hastily cooked meal, making each chunk of your game a valuable day in which to gather resources and progress as much as possible. It’s up to you to meter the time given to you without pushing your man too hard.
Resources, as in any good survival horror, are scarce. You have an inventory to hold plot-relevant items, and can combine them as needed to improve the effectiveness of food, or interacted with to give some insight on your situation. There are a number of ways to survive hostile encounters too, either with combat or stealth. You are given a gun early on, but are also shown how to avoid the creatures entirely using bait and shadows. The game tries to give you a choice on how you want to play, and Byrne has created a dynamic where your playing style affects the ending you get. The Director’s Cut adds a few more endings to the mix but you’re likely not to get any of them on your first playthrough unless you’re particulary committed to one method of survival.
Even so, occasionally you will be forced into a gunfight, and it is here the weaknesses come to light. Lone Survivor draws its gameplay and aesthetic from point and click games, not Resident Evil. Aside the zombies, the only hangover it shares with Capcom’s shooty shooty monster fare is the desperately clunky controls.
It’s clear that the awkward fighting style is meant to discourage you from doing a Schwarzenegger, but having your character put into a situation where he has no choice but to burn through ammo is an unwelcome dissonance. Pulling out your gun locks your character into facing a certain direction, and you can be backed into a corner in seconds without any way to move around your attacker. These battles are by far the weakest part of the game, and can quickly render an initially terrifying encounter into a frustrating button-masher.
For their simplistic style, the monsters are genuinely horrific, and are very adept at getting in your way. The grainy, pebbledash look of the game is rendered in an array of corridors and dark alleys mostly lit by your flickering torchlight, so the overall effect is of gaming through a letterbox. It’s a remarkably claustrophobic effect.
The game is incredible coming from one man, who has applied his vision of survival horror to the 2D landscape with aplomb. A consequence of the single-man development means that the game brings with it a strong sense of identity, taking childlike simplicity and corrupting it with the profane. This comes across in the sound, a feature with its own personality that meshes rock with jazz and sparkles brilliantly in contrast to the rough aesthetic, against all expectations. The music deserves an article of its own.
Unfortunately, you can have too much of a good thing, and the game does overstay its welcome after the initial fright wears off. Planning out your daily activities to keep track of the more mundane aspects of survival is a great gameplay tool that could have used some fleshing out for variance, but there is little incentive to improve your character’s lot. The resources are too easy to gather beyond a certain point and so become more of a checklist than a driving technique. I was also bitterly disappointed at the inclusion of forced-combat scenes, especially as there were good and memorable instances of avoidable encounters.
Lone Survivor has a lot to say. With your nameless character squatting in a rotting city, there’s a yearning for blue skies and innocence, and a deep sense of loss. There’s a detached feel to everything; a sense that, beyond the apocalyptic wasteland, there is something fundamentally wrong with your world. It is certainly a game that will stay with you for a long time. For the most part, Lone Survivor has captured the essence of survival horror and has brought to it a kind of simplistic beauty that shines beyond the corruption.
8/10