Lone Survivor: Director's Cut

I pretty much played this game to redeem my shame to the team on the blog and close off the month with an actual horror game. Since it has no achievement and is a horror game this was pretty much the only way I was ever going play it.

As I am sure you have figured out, the game is a survival horror game. It was developed and published by Superflat Games who are a tiny indie development studios as you can tell from their shitty website. Surprisingly it isn't a PC exclusive and it can be found on the Wii U, PS Vita, PS3 and PS4. I played it on my PC through steam, because I bought a gaming machine to play pixelated rubbish that would look out of date on a first generation gameboy.

The game is a really short experience that you can finish between an hour to two hours, I am not entirely sure if it was a design choice or not but the game felt really rushed and light on story. I get that madness and sanity are big themes in the game, but I wasn't entirely sure what was going on and what was and wasn't real in the game. Even reading the fan theories regarding the game all the explanations listed are grasping at straws at best in my opinion. Now, while this lead to my overall confusion and discomfort with the game I wasn't really happy with it since I didn't get any closure at the end of the game.

The aesthetic of the game's graphic style and sound designs was quite good with regards to creating a really tense experience. The graphics were the weaker aspect in my opinion as its really hard to convey horror when I can barely read the text on the screen due to the game being unoptimized for high resolution screens. The sound while better, also had its flash with the music being really grating as opposed to being genuinely tense or exciting. 

The gameplay mechanics are kind of clunky and were themselves another source of tension similar to the one I brought up above. There was more than one occasion where I didn't understand what I had to go through so many menus in order to get a simple task done when I had all the needed pieces to complete it. Moving around and combat was also slow and not engaging, after getting the gun combat and most enemies became fairly mundane and took away from the scare factor of the game.

Overall, all aspects of the game come together to create a  really tense experience for the player. I refrain from calling it horror though since I was never afraid while playing the game, this shouldn't take away from how tense I did feel while playing it though. That tension was quite aggravating though and I'm glad to be done with the game. This game seems to be really popular with fans of the silent hill franchise so I'd recommend it to those people, otherwise you are free to skip this game as you won't be missing much.