(You know, it's weird. Despite being the first trope page that I ever created, this isn't anywhere near my top tier of best games. Guess I just wanted to get something out of it. Oh well.)
Jasper Byrne's Survival Horror / Adventure Game hybrid is something that looks like it's got everything such a project should have, at least on paper. Zombie Apocalypse, retraux 8-bitty graphics, mentally unstable protagonist, icky veiny Mordor architecture... the works. The execution... now that's something completely different.
The survival mechanics seem more like a deconstruction of survival horror tropes than anything. You've got food, yes, but you're not gonna get as much out of eating it as you will from cooking it and mixing it with something else. This, of course, requires you to return to your apartment hub and use the oven to do so. While a pretty novel take on the subject, it does tend to get a bit tedious. Thankfully, this is mitigated by several teleporting mirrors and whatnot. The combat system allows you to play through the game guns blazing, or as a pacifist. The latter is, as is par for the course, the more rewarding option. How you deal with the Humanoid Abominations is entirely up to you; however, both this and almost every other choice you make can heavily influence the ending you get. This, too, is a pretty sweet concept and would have worked, if not for...
The narrative being a complete and unsatisfactory mess. Cryptic Conversations and a metric fuckton of vagueness is all well and good—being spoon-fed exposition is a plague on gaming these days, make no mistake—but next to nothing in the game is spelled out. Is anything that you see even real? Needless to say, this is detaching to the point of not-giving-a-shittedness. None of the aforementioned endings seem to resolve anything. It seems like it would be hard for anyone but the creator himself to be able to make sense of it, which begs the question as to whom he created the game for.
Granted, Lone Survivor is pretty goddamn creepy, and apart from your apartment you never really feel safe. Atmosphere is important, and this game's got it in spades. As a game however, the mechanics are middling to good. There are plenty of novel and interesting concepts in this game, but most of them seem wasted on the perceived ineptitude of Mr. Byrne.
Superflawed
(You know, it's weird. Despite being the first trope page that I ever created, this isn't anywhere near my top tier of best games. Guess I just wanted to get something out of it. Oh well.)
Jasper Byrne's Survival Horror / Adventure Game hybrid is something that looks like it's got everything such a project should have, at least on paper. Zombie Apocalypse, retraux 8-bitty graphics, mentally unstable protagonist, icky veiny Mordor architecture... the works. The execution... now that's something completely different.
The survival mechanics seem more like a deconstruction of survival horror tropes than anything. You've got food, yes, but you're not gonna get as much out of eating it as you will from cooking it and mixing it with something else. This, of course, requires you to return to your apartment hub and use the oven to do so. While a pretty novel take on the subject, it does tend to get a bit tedious. Thankfully, this is mitigated by several teleporting mirrors and whatnot. The combat system allows you to play through the game guns blazing, or as a pacifist. The latter is, as is par for the course, the more rewarding option. How you deal with the Humanoid Abominations is entirely up to you; however, both this and almost every other choice you make can heavily influence the ending you get. This, too, is a pretty sweet concept and would have worked, if not for...
The narrative being a complete and unsatisfactory mess. Cryptic Conversations and a metric fuckton of vagueness is all well and good—being spoon-fed exposition is a plague on gaming these days, make no mistake—but next to nothing in the game is spelled out. Is anything that you see even real? Needless to say, this is detaching to the point of not-giving-a-shittedness. None of the aforementioned endings seem to resolve anything. It seems like it would be hard for anyone but the creator himself to be able to make sense of it, which begs the question as to whom he created the game for.
Granted, Lone Survivor is pretty goddamn creepy, and apart from your apartment you never really feel safe. Atmosphere is important, and this game's got it in spades. As a game however, the mechanics are middling to good. There are plenty of novel and interesting concepts in this game, but most of them seem wasted on the perceived ineptitude of Mr. Byrne.