Ten years ago Lone Survivor got released to the market that was entirely devoid of titles attempting classic survival horror and for this alone received a lot of attention. That wasn’t the only positive feature about the game, of course, but for a lot of people it was somewhat of a symbol of how big budget companies were simply unwilling to make games like this and it was for the independent developers to finally revive the genre. Personally? I didn’t get into the game much for various reasons that I will outline below, but it was a title I remembered and at least respected.
Nowadays, classic survival horror is finally being revived with many titles attempting fresh takes on the genre, some of them even being good. And after many years of being hinted at, and a few years of development, Lone Survivor returns in its updated format as Super Lone Survivor. Is it interesting today?
To get few important things out of the way first. Original release of Lone Survivor was made on a custom engine seemingly based on either Adobe AIR or Adobe Flash, which wasn’t entirely uncommon for independent releases of the time. Unity was just getting popular, going free at around 2009, and Unreal Engine was still license-only, like most of the “AAA” engines, so smaller independent developers had no means to use it. This meant that the original game release had plenty of technical limitations and choices that couldn’t be easily (if at all) rectified, especially by a solo developer. Hence why Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut was made with the help of a different studio and apart from new content had only some changes and fixes to the basic quality of life things. Super Lone Survivor is an engine port to Unity, hence why the game features some of the new helpful updates.
But… Problem is, despite being on Unity, it’s still incredibly limited and inconvenient as far as quality of life stuff goes. Some of my biggest issues with the original release are still here. Controls don’t automatically switch to what you’re using and the game only accepts keyboard until you go into settings. None of the controls are rebindable on any of the input methods. There are no meaningful graphics settings for the game and no matter how you tweak it, the visuals still feel incredibly uncomfortable full screen on a PC monitor. Especially the text that can be physically painful to read. Some of the things are now gone, even, so instead of having a clear “Quit” menu, you have a vague symbol of a door for a button that you have to hold to quit the game. And some of the button prompts and settings don’t even explain what they do.
Still, the benefit of this release is that at least now it’s possible to address these issues. Hopefully by the developer himself, but if not – there’s a chance fans can provide necessary tweaks. And in addition, there is new content too. Can’t really tell what it is and how much of it is there, since I’ve never completed the original release, but from the things that I’ve found myself – apparently, some of it was entirely new and non-existent before.
About the game itself – it is a classic survival horror title with an emphasis on stealth and avoiding combat. And the inspiration for the entire game system seems to have been the ability to drop beef jerkies in Silent Hill 3 to lure enemies away – an ability that was almost entirely pointless in SH3 itself, but here it’s actually kinda cool. Just like in a good classic survival horror, you explore an interconnected world, gradually opening it up and providing safer shortcuts for yourself, while gathering helpful resources. There’s a fun schedule to how you’re meant to approach the game that uses the survival genre aspects like the need to eat and the fact that to save the game you need to sleep at home. So you start at home, plan your next “expedition”, get back to safety to eat and sleep to continue exploration the next day. It’s not too complex to be annoying like in survival games, but important enough to get you in the right mood.
My other big issue with the game was another thing that wasn’t “fixed”, probably because it’s part of the appeal. The game is incredibly vague about everything apart from at least giving you clear “get here somehow” goals. Is the character hungry or tired, how much is he damaged? No idea, try to intuit from description lines and some barely noticeable visual effects. What does “X” items does? Use it and find out. Despite not being a roguelike, the game’s approach to its systems certainly feels like one. And a lot of people will probably gladly spend dozens of hours trying to decipher all of the esoteric meanings of things and obtuse tasks where stuff just happens or appears somewhere if you look at a thing funny. I understand the appeal to that, even if I don’t like it myself.
What I don’t like is that this gets so ridiculous that if you just want to explore and try out things, you sometimes get into situations where you don’t know if you did everything you could, if there’s a bug in the game, or if you’re missing something. For example, there’s a location that is apparently new to this release that requires an item to enter it and an item to exit it. I’ve scoured the location 3 times and didn’t find the item to exit it. Was it a bug? Did I have to spin 3 times and enter a Konami code? No idea. Same with another new location where I could get to it, see a linear sequence of events that teleport me back home. Then return to the location and it would then play the same linear sequence as if I haven’t seen it before. Is it meant to be like this? Is it a bug?..
So, on one hand, I did enjoy going through the game this time and there is a desire to play more, as there are new endings, more things to see and secrets to uncover. But on the other – I have zero desire to do it while the quality of life aspects aren’t fixed and there’s always this annoying feeling that the only way to know if you’re doing something is to look up a wiki or a forum post, instead of trying to do things on your own. Because who knows if you are dumb or the game bugged out or what is even going on. Plus, there are so many instances where you can just die because when and how far enemies can damage you is almost impossible to visually predict and the helpful quick use buttons don’t work 80% of the time.
Is Lone Survivor (that doesn’t have Super anywhere inside the game itself, by the way) still interesting today? Yes. If you like the genre, it can be worth checking out. It’s stylish, it has cool soundtrack, fun mechanics and it’s enjoyable to explore, even if it also has all of those annoyances I’ve listed. Is it worth for people who already own the original? I mean, I do but I was hoping that this release fixes the issues of it, and so far it didn’t, so… I don’t know. If you love the title, probably yes, and there is a promise that this version will get even better. If you don’t – unless you are like me and want to give it another chance, probably not. Unless, of course, you just want to support the devs. But if you don’t own the original – get this version instead.