Lone Survivor is a 2D psychological survival-horror game that pulls a lot from David Lynch and the Silent Hill series. I originally played it back when it came out from the developer's website, and have played through it a few times since also on Steam and on the PS3.

You play as a nameless character who is stationed in an apartment in a ruined city. Each day is a struggle, with limited supplies and draining willpower. Our character decides that he doesn't want to die alone, and sets off to find someone else to give meaning to his minimal existence. As he ventures out, he does meet other characters, but they all seem rather odd. Are they real, or a figment of his imagination? Is everything as it seems, or just an illusion?

The game has atmosphere in spades. While the graphics are low-res and pixely, the game has a fundamental understanding of the effect minimalism can have on games; like the original Silent Hill or Resident Evil, your mind fills in the blanks of details. Everything is just detailed enough to make out what everything is, but minimalistic enough that your imagination fills in the blanks. The game also utilizes some nice lighting and fog effects to help add to the atmosphere.

The audio is fantastic, with moody and stylistic music, wonderful sound design, and while unsettling, adds so much to the experience.

The game doesn't have jump-scares, but rather mood to unsettle and oppress you. Some will find this decision to make the game ultimately not very scary, but it remains tense and unnerving through tough obstacles and strange moments.

The game is a bit cryptic, which might turn some off from the title. Something that most may not see coming is that our character has human needs for things like sleep, food, and rest of mind. If you don't take good care of your character, it effects him. And to take good care of him means to search around for things that may help, such as gas for his stove to cook things or a game system and batteries to use to play it with. You collect food and supplies from the environment, and from utilizing these elements you can help tend to your characters needs. Or you can not, and just do the minimum effort to get by.

But choice in gameplay matters here. The game has about six different endings (one of them is a slight alteration of another ending though), with four available on the fist playthrough. Which ending you head towards is not determined by simple A or B choices, but by how you play the game. And most everything effects it. How often do you eat? How often do you sleep? Do you use the transfer mirrors to return home? Do you indulge in side-quest? Do fun but meaningless things to help your sanity? Do you help or hurt this guy? Do you kill or avoid enemies? All these choices add to an unseen score (that they finally show you after the credits) which determine which ending path you're going on. Well, that is except one ending, where you need to do a secret side-quest to obtain it.

There are a few points the game drags on a bit, particularly of note in the basement segment where your map is near useless and maneuvering can become rather confusing. After completing the game for the first time, you'll probably have more questions than answers. To really get the full experience of Lone Survivor means to play the game more than once, in fact certain areas, side-quests, and endings aren't even available until the second playthrough. This kind of commitment will turn some off from the game. And for some the survival element will feel superficial, as the game essentially will give you anything you need if you don't mind gaining 'ending points' to go on a certain bad ending path.

But it's also probably one of the truest Silent Hill games to release since Silent Hill stopped really being SH, and is one of the best 2D horror games to exist. To really dig into the game requires hard work to keep your sanity up and your spirits high, and rewards those that dig into the game's systems and figure it all out.

Lone Survivor is atmospheric, and in my opinion, one of the best 2D horror games in terms of atmosphere, and one of my personal favorites. It has sim-like mechanics not all will care to manage, but those that delve into it will be rewarded with interesting story twists, revelations, and new areas. It needs to be replayed to be fully experienced, but likely will attract a niche audience with its surrealism and mysterious storyline. For those less interested in the strange, there is a pretty solid old-school styled survival-horror game here. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but it's an ominous adventure while it lasts.

Yes, so much recommending.

Great story

Pretty scary, even when you know whats coming

NO FREAKING JUMPSCARES

Survival like crazy.

I'd love this for linux. PLEASE. Also maybe an infinite mode? If it's possible, that'd be really cool. You know what, screw that make a sequel and make it better than the first game.

This is a great example of how outstanding music can elevate a game from good to great. I also do not want to disregard the writing in this game either. The creator managed to meaningful dialogue within the game without over doing it and without being corny.

The retro pixel art is outstanding. The pacing can suffer a little from time to time as you wander around looking for what to do next. But aside from that, I enjoyed gradually making my way through the 7 hour campaign. The enemies are not found in abundance or varied but all placed with thought behind the room design. That and other attention to detail show me the the developer who made this game truely cared about what he was making.

If you are in the mood for a retro survival horror game you probably won't do better than this.

After an apocalypse, you are a Lone Survivor lurking in the halls of a low fidelity 2D side scrolling, abandon apartment building. There is no power and supplies are limited. Every day you leave the safety of your humble bedroom in search of food and a solution to the mysterious, surrealistic hallucinations that are happening to you.

What lurks beyond your apartment 206 walls are faceless mutants that only have a sense of smell to find you. This sense of smell leads them to find rotting chunks of meat that you can find in refrigerators and leave to bait them. Once you've dropped some meat, you can hide in specific areas and watch as they travel past you.

You do find a gun, but ammunition is scarce and these wandering mutants take a few bullets to put down. Firing is slow, reloading is slow, but that comes with the genre. How can you be terrified of a mutant walking toward you when you can instantly kill it? Well how can you be terrified when you have a gun to take them down?

Lone Survivor has all of the makings of a survival horror game or at least a point and click adventure without clicking anything. The game is keyboard only which under normal circumstances, I have no problem with, but I do prefer a controller. The real problem is there are plenty of keys to use and sometimes finding the correct key in the glow of your monitor can be a daunting task. There are keys for reloading, shoot and interact share a key, left, right, flashlight, map, leave meat, show the inventory and two other things. Eight keys in all and even more for gamma correction and so on.

The game excels in an atmosphere and creepy vibe. Flesh covered walls you need to cut through. Coming across a party going on in a room while there are threatening mutants outside. Having to find a girl's stuffed animal. Saying hi to a plant as you pass by. Finding a girl locked away behind bars. You are a lone survivor though. How can you be lone and yet have all of these people inhabiting your wrecked apartment building? You're the only one tat seems to know there's any danger going on. Every so often you experience a dream or hallucination in the form of a cut scene that plays out and only adds to the odd experience. One cut scene has you and someone else in chairs discussing pills. It adds to the surrealism that the game brings.

The radio in your bedroom and your plush cat toy are your only source of friendship. The radio gives hints as to what you should be doing and you will find cards that tell you what stations to tune into. Its a good way to bring you back to a game if you go long periods without playing. After all the best way to play is in the dark after midnight and who can stay up that late?

I know that your character sure gets tired easy. He gets exhausted as much as he gets hungry and when he gets tired, you need to return to your room every ten or so minutes. Its only a constant recommendation. Something might happen if you take too long, but its never anything that you need to do right then and there.

To make travel easier, you can look into a mirror and teleport your way through back to your apartment. It adds to the surreal nature of the game, and it becomes mandatory because you need to fight the whims of your character. He gets tired and hungry as we all would in a world of sheer darkness and famine, but he refuses to do things like traverse a hole he had gone through before. Its a good way to force you to use the mirrors as a sort of tutorial. Doors are locked and your character mentions coming back there later.

You get a map of the apartment level with all of its rooms. Everything is marked, locked doors, blockages, open doors and so on. It feels small enough to learn your way around over several trips, but you can still get lost. Places to go are marked with giant question marks, but the problem is, these never go away, even long after you've explored everything in the room.

There are plenty of items such as can openers, gas tanks for stoves and hams that need to be cooked that manage to still be fine in a refrigerator with no power. You can see an item's description in the menu. Some things are obvious, but its the food that you need to see if its spoiled before you consume it. There's also an option to talk with objects, such as your sleepy cat doll. Whatever keeps the crazy isolation away I suppose.

While I do feel the menu is a bit cumbersome to use, it keeps you in the action because its just a minimal series of items at the top of the screen. I'd rather stay in a game like this than hop to a menu. When you see an item that can be interacted with, you still need to delve into the menu and use the item when it could have been streamlined so you just use it at the proper place. I can chalk it up to survival horror game design forcing you to figure out that you need to use a can opener on cans.

You can find red, green and blue pills scattered around here or there. The choice to take them is yours, but I learned from arcade games in the 90s that winners don't use drugs. They accumulate to a sort of score at the end determined by what food, pills and choices that you made such as pushing drugs on someone.

As a character, you're alone and sanity has gone with everyone else. You're wearing a medical mask that might keep out whatever mutating apocalyptic virus there is, but it also makes him look like he has a giant smile in this shambled building shooting "mutants" while downing pills.

Lone Survivor feels like a good, simple game, but once all the mutants are dead the challenge goes with them. New areas have new mutants, but roaming through an empty wasteland for the fourth time can get dull. With an area so small, its never frustrating and the game lays out your objectives in a good manor to keep you going. Other times you'll need to check cabinets that you've already checked previous to being stumped in order to find a hole to crawl through.

Its easy to recommend for its atmosphere, surrealism and simplicity. Its a good environment that takes you to a different place where there are no clear answers only your interpretations.

I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who is or has been a fan of psychological horror games.
Lone Survivor has a very Silent Hill feel to it, and quickly allows the player to become immersed in it's interesting story line. Although the pacing can be a little slow at times when you're trying to discover what to do next, the game offers interesting puzzles and combat that requires you to be tactical, in a sense.

The music for the game is incredibly catchy, but also quite dark, and goes perfectly with the game's dark theme and humour.
Despite being only 8-bit, this game could be considered better than some big-budget that currently exist.

I'd recommend this game to anyone who is in the mood for a retro psychological horror, or loves games that carry dark-underlying themes and immersive storylines.

Wonderful game. A proof that you don't need fancy and photo-realistic graphics to be disturbing and horrific.

Ah, Lone Survivor, a 2-D retro survival horror game that makes most of nowadays "horror" games feel ashamed. It's not the spookiest, but it's definitely tense as all hell.

First off, I'm gonna say, the difficulty of this game is truly remarkable, even on normal mode. Normal mode on other modern survival horror games basically holds your hand for the whole playthrough, with a puzzle now and then to hinder your progress, or they are rather linear. This game is hard. First, you get tired AND hungry at times. Second, food items might be common, but mostly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ones. You can scavenge for food, cook it, collect water dripping from the ceiling with a bucket, stuff like that.

Third, and my favorite, what made games like the first Resident Evil true masterpieces:

Not enough ammo for every single enemy that you come across. So, you gotta play smart, hide from the monsters, distract them, use items, basically, you gotta think before you waste even a single bullet, because if you do, you are going to regret it later on.

I can describe this game for common folks with a single sentence. "It's like Silent Hill but 2D". That's what most of the ones that have played this game use to describe it. The story has something to do with the outbreak of a disease that turns people into some kind of faceless zombies that wander around all the time. You are locked inside of your apartment, and that's pretty much how you survived, but now you gotta find a way out of that dreaded building, having to face tons of enemies with just a few bullets, so to speak. The game's got multiple endings, so there is that, too.

This game might be short-ish compared to other stuff I've played before, but it's definitely worth it. It's nothing short of frustrating at times. The game starts nice and slow, but once you reach the basement, you can actually feel the difficulty spike going up your ass. Hard. No lube. It was kind of linear before that, with a map telling you were to go, but once you reach the basement, say bye bye to that, and be prepared for backtracking, corridors full of enemies, running out of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ batteries or ammo, getting lost, or falling into death traps.

The music is pretty good, nothing that extreme, just ambiental tracks that really help the game. The controls are unremarkable, standard 2D controls, move left and right, aim, shoot, interact, that's about it.There is a pause button, but the inventory isn't a safe place to hide.

The graphics are akin of SNES games and stuff like that. The visuals are nice, even if it gets really dark at times.

All in all, I would recommend this game to any fan of survival horror games out there. It can be unforgiving for the casual everyman, so be prepared if you are one of those.

You
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'Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut' is one of these little games that shows how good indie titles can be.
This little pixelated horror adventure suceeds where many huge (Horror-)AAA-titles fail nowadays: Creating a deep and atmospheric experience full of creepy and mysterious situations without relying too much on (cheap) tricks like e.g. jumps scares behind every corner.

After the outbreak of an unknown disease the nameless protagonist – only called 'You' – tries to survive in this harsh and cruel world. He lives withdrawn in a lost apartment building, unsure if he is still sane or if everything he sees is only a hallucination. Due to the questionable mental stability and the omnipresent problem of starvation he doesn't know how long he may be able to stay alive. First of alll 'You' doesn’t want to die alone – therefore he starts exploring the apartments and looking for other survivors of the catastrophe.

While exploring the remnants of the 'good old times', 'You' will be confrontend with deep fears and mysterious situations, monsters and hallucinations, unsure what is real and what is just a trick of his own mind. Armed with a flaslight, batteries and a gun with very limited ammunition he makes his way into the unknown depths of the apartments, facing mysterious horrors while trying to keep the rest of his sanity and finding enough food to eat and time to sleep. The only 'true‘ friends he has in this apocalyptic world are a plant and a plush doll – but is it really a sign of sanity to talk to them? Who knows…

The story is short but well done and the dialogues make you actually care about the characters, their well-being and their behavior, questioning the situations that 'You' has to face in and what’s really happening in front of him as everything may change in the blink of an eye. And in the end every step and decision you‘ve taken may affect him.
Until 'You' will see the end of his journey it will take approximately four up to maybe five hours (I finished the game already two times outside of Steam, therefore my short gaming time is no sign of lacking experience). Fortunately the replay value is quite high due to many different endings based on your choices during 'You‘s' journey and a NG+ Mode with some additional content.
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To cut it short: It’s a pixelated game based on Flash Engine so you shouldn’t expect too
much – but for this it does quite a good job. The games‘ soundtrack is fantastic and fits most of the times absolutely perfect. It’s creepy and catchy at the same time, giving you the chills in the right moments.
The pixelated graphics are well done and you can see that the different appartmens, rooms and scenes were crafted carefully and with a love for details. The game feels like a great trip in good old 2D-Horror Games and has a deeper atmosphere than many huge titles nowadays.
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Unfortunately 'Lone Survivor' somehow feels bulky and using the inventory or selecting items can be quite annoying from time to time (just as using your gun in my opinion). The controls aren’t very comfortable despite some hotkeys, remapping them isn‘t possible and due to the restrictions of flash games there is no easy solution for controller support aside from third party software – a fact where the game would benefit from heavily. That’s kind of sad as the PS3-version has both controller support and achievements (that are somehow missing in the PC version).
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This game may give you the chills while taking you on a little journey about sanity, surviving and the horrors that are hiding either in the shadows or in your own mind. Sure, it has some flaws and edges but the overall experience is intense and it suceeds in creating a deep and nice atmosphere when 'You' tries to hide from the strange creatures or faces them – realizing that he’s actually out of ammunition. Moreover it has a brilliant soundtrack. Seriously.

I’d rate it 9 out of 10 points and definitely recommend the game - it's worth the money, even without a sale.

This endorsement approved by The Reviewers' Union, providing better standards for reviews and reviewers.

It's like a 2D Silent Hill game, but doesn't really deliver on horror for me. Its strength lies in its ability to make you wonder just what the hell is going on. It plays on the fear of the unknown, I'd say. There's almost always something weird and unexplained around the next corner. All in all, the game has very nice atmosphere, pixel art and just a tight survival gameplay mechanic. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1226290664 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=792634014 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1410632390

I really knew next to nothing about the game when I started. I had only read a few lines of positive feedback on it, and seen about 5 minutes of gameplay on youtube, after which it had captured my interest enough for me to take a chance on it, and I'm thoroughly glad I did. It turned out to be one of the best indie titles I've played. The reason for this is perhaps because I went in blind with no real prior knowledge or spoilers about the game. There's something to be said for experiencing a game in this manner. I thoroughly recommend it.

As for the story.. Well it's rather hard to talk too much about the story in detail. Partly because it's fairly weird (no, really), and partly because there isn't much of a story at all. It's one of those kind of games where the whole world has gone mad, you are seemingly one of the very few survivors of what must have been an event that ended civilization.

You wake up in your apartment, which acts as your safe zone, where you can sleep (save), and prepare food and drink, and other things. Once you venture outside, you quickly find out that in order to survive, you have to deal with the monsters that now roam the halls and inhabit the other apartments.
One way to deal with them is to shoot them with your trusty pistol, though you can't just go all gung ho, because if you run out of ammo, you're in for a rough time since there are no other weapons in the game. However, there are various ways of getting more ammo along the way, so it's not the end of the world. I ran out of ammo once, and it took me quite a while to get more, but in the meantime I took the more stealthy approach, which is absolutely viable, and perhaps even preferable for large parts of the game.

The controls are a bit clunky if things have to go fast in terms of inventory management while monsters are about. The reason for this is that there is no way of stopping time. It'll just keep ticking away regardless of what you're doing, which means monsters aren't going to stand around and wait for you to open your inventory, find the right item, and use it. They will just make short work if you while you are otherwise occupied with your inventory.
This is a good thing though, as having time stop just because you want to open up your inventory and find items in the middle of combat really breaks the immersion, so be prepared to run away to a "safe" area before taking care of your health or mental state.

Speaking of inventory management, you will often find that you get hungry or tired as you explore the game, and since you can die of both starvation and exhaustion in this game, you'll always have to be aware of how much food and drink you have on you, and how much time it'll take you to get back to your apartment in order to sleep in case you don't have caffeine on you. You can even die if you run out of batteries for your flashlight, so you have to watch out how much you have it turned on.

Speaking of food. You might not always have the right equipment in your kitchen to cook what you find along the way either, so you'll also need to find the proper cookware if you want to prepare the various foods in the game. Apparently, you were a big fan of ordering in before the world turned bad, because you don't seem to own much of anything in that department.

The game took me a little under 5 hours to complete, and I really enjoyed every moment of it. I imagine this is much like what the original Silent Hill would have been like if they had gone with a 2-d side scroller instead of 3d.

It's well worth your time and money, so I say go for it if you're a fan of the genre. You won't regret it.