Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut (Wii U) Review

Lone Survivor is a weird and strange experience, and one that I didn’t quite know how to interpret. It’s an indie game that embraces survival horror sensibilities but combines them with an incredibly lo-fi method of presentation. And it’s show but don’t tell attitude is easily a lesson in subtlety that many horror game makers (heck, even film makers) fail to acknowledge even today. In an age where games like Slender and Outlast are designed to be played in front of a transient YouTube audience, Lone Survivor throws that all away – it’s not necessarily the most interesting game to watch but it’s tense as hell to play. Part Silent Hill, part Eternal Darkness, part Last of Us – Lone Survivor is an experience worth playing, despite its minor setbacks.

Similarly, I’m very reluctant to divulge too much information as to what Lone Survivor is about as it’s definitely something you want to experience and discover yourself. You play as a nameless man who has been living in his dilapidated apartment block for an undisclosed amount of time. Most of humanity has been wiped out by a deadly virus and turned into zombies or mutants. The player character is starved and exhausted, but must escape the city by any means necessary.

I’ll leave my plot summary at that but needless to say Lone Survivor does a great job at integrating its story with its gameplay without compromising either of them, and when the credits are rolling there’s just enough room left to leave you pondering how things played out and for what purpose. It’s been a while since a game made me think and piece together the pieces to find out just what occurred, so it’s refreshing to play an experience like this in Lone Survivor.

Lone Survivor is presented as a pretty typical looking 2D side scroller. The player character can eat food and scrounge resources, fire his handgun and traverse obstacles. It’s a simple system. Throughout the game the character will have an inner monologue which will veer players in the right direction, but of course players can ignore this and do whatever they want. This represents one of the more interesting gameplay elements of Lone Survivor – players can effectively ignore their own needs and push themselves beyond their limit in an attempt to survive or improve resource management.

For example, in the game, my character was clearly tired and beginning to hallucinate (at least, I thought he was). There was an easy solution to this – to sleep, but sleeping leaves me vulnerable. Instead I can take coffee or (presumably) caffeine pills to keep me going, but certain items have long term consequences on the game. It’s very rare that a game like Lone Survivor gives so much agency to the player and it’s easily one of the best things about it.

Most of the “action” in the game comes from encounters with the mutants, who are purposely made to be powerful so that the player finds them more distressing. They can be distracted with pieces of meat and snuck past, or they can even be outrun and lost in a tense and dread inducing chase sequence. You have a gun, of course, but the gun really does feel like a last resort because not only does it attract other mutants but it is extremely limited in ammo.

When you’re not completing your main quest, there’s heaps of side activities to indulge in that feature some pretty weird and surrealist goals to complete – like improving your own cooking abilities or interacting with other survivors to bring them a sense of solace. Most of these activities take place in your apartment, which serves as a hub of sorts, and also serves as a save room in the game.

As with most horror games, Lone Survivor is as its best when it’s letting you walk around slowly and take everything in. The chase sequences are nice to ramp up the tension, but there’s one major problem with them in particular and said problem extends to the whole game. The map itself is top down, which means that in a side scrolling game it can be hard to properly orient yourself, especially during the more intense chase sequences. It’s not a dealbreaker, by any means, but it can be extremely annoying to continually lose your way throughout your adventure.

Being The Director’s Cut, Lone Survivor features several new endings, quests and enemies to take on. It’s by no means a definitive reason to buy the game again if you’ve played it previously, but it certainly feels more complete and looks much better too. The game itself is over in four to five hours, which makes it hard to justify the $18AU price tag, but it’s designed to be played several times to unlock one of five or so endings. Most of Lone Survivor’s appeal is in finding out just how the game works our which ending to give the player – but we’ll give you a hint, it’s all down to the player characters psyche.

As you can see from the screenshots, the game adopts a very retro sprite based style that weirdly enough works in a game like this. Such a lo-fi approach to presentation helps make things appear dirtier and quite frankly makes them slightly creepier as objects are harder to make out than what they would be if they were modelled fully and properly. The lighting, which was improved for this Director’s Cut, is also great, lending the game a unique and oppressive atmosphere.

But it’s definitely not pushing the Wii U, and given that the game only allows off-screen play on the GamePad and nothing else, we reckon it could easily be on the 3DS too. Given that the Vita version of the game features touchscreen controls, it’s bizarre that none of that was brought across to the Wii U version. Minor complaints, as I said before, but ones that stick out like a sore thumb.

The soundtrack is similarly quite amazing and really helps to immerse you in the world of the game. There were times where I would notice I was only getting tense because of the music and the music alone – the environment wasn’t foreboding and there were no immediate dangers on screen, just a creepy soundtrack. There’s no voice work, so most of the game is presented through dialogue, but poor voice work could easily take the player out of the experience so I respect this decision, whether artistic or financial, from the developer.

Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut is a very fun and yet very tense survival horror game that embraces the mantra of show, don’t tell. It combines genuine resource management with psychological horror and tension to provide a unique experience to any horror fan. And that’s really who this game is for – being extremely replayable – horror fans will have a lot to do and enjoy breaking open the game to discover just how it awards those endings. The price is a bit heavy and I could do without the chase sequences or average map, but this is a game that any survival horror fan will not be disappointed in picking up.

Rating: 4 / 5