developed by Superflat Games [= Jasper Byrne] (Cambridge, UK)
designed and written by Jasper Byrne
Lone Survivor is precisely what I am acknowledging there to be a zillion of: a miniature production that doesn’t outwardly seem very distinctive, despite actually being a painstaking attempt to put across some subtle emotional thing that is highly particular to its author. Hey, that’s what “art” is, isn’t it.
This is a textbook example of an indie “little pixel guy” game, a boom genre of our time. What lies in the hearts of little pixel guys? Are they doing good or evil? Are they visionary or lost? Will they prosper or are they doomed? Is the world for or against them? The spiritual condition of the little pixel guy is an endless source of interest to a certain mindset.
In this particular case, the little pixel guy is poignantly just getting by, lone surviving in a desolated monster-ridden city which may or may not be all a dream. If it’s a dream, it’s about grief over a dead lover. Which is to say it’s in the “Lost Lenore” category of the emo-pocalypse subgenre, also surprisingly well-populated these days.
Basically, it’s exactly what you see it to be in the trailer above. But despite all the magic creepiness that interactivity can offer — and the game is indeed quite creepy to play — the trailer is ultimately a more effective delivery system for the vibe than the game. My play experience got bogged down in design misjudgments, which I have articulated below at great length and then immediately cut and pasted into my dead letter file so that you don’t have to waste your time reading.
In superbrief: the design is overthunk and overtheorized, with attempts to create “interesting systems” that end up diluting the atmosphere that is the whole point. Atmosphere is not a system. Emotional experience is not “interest.” Imagination is not a collection of hypotheticals.
The game is not unsuccessful at being indie-particular and getting some of its special thing across. It feels mostly quite earnest, which is always good. It’s scary, and it’s peculiar enough that I genuinely wanted to see it through to the end, despite my irritations. But being a four-hour game full of lots of little variables (plus various incentives for repeated replay) doesn’t suit it. I would rather have done this as a streamlined 1-hour experience. Or, like I said, maybe best of all just as a 2-minute trailer. (In that spirit: here’s the slicker “Director’s Cut” trailer, synced to hipster dream-pop.)
It felt like a staple-bound self-published comic book. A high-quality one, well-trimmed and printed on good paper, and skilled, with spirited experimentation. But there’s a certain scale appropriate to such things. 32 pages, or 48. 64 starts to feel like a lot.
Maybe I’m just getting old. (“Maybe I’m just getting old.”) But, you know, four hours! Of little pixel guy hiding from zombies and making coffee in his apartment. That’s a long time.
I enjoyed “Donald’s Dilemma,” but I didn’t understand the connection to the linked phrase. Daisy had to wait a long time?
Little pixel guy is constructed exactly like the human figures my mother embroidered into a rug in 1953; that is to say, he is made up entirely of squares of color. It is a little disconcerting to see such a figure (in the rug, he is a fireman, a postman, a farmer, a school-boy) shooting bad guys and encountering monsters.
It’s a callback to the previous entry, where I said that 6 hours spent playing a mediocre game could have been spent watching 45 Donald Duck shorts. Specifically, Donald’s Dilemma and 44 others. In this case, with a 4-hour game, more like 30 Donald Duck shorts. Specifically, Donald’s Dilemma and 29 others. For example, probably Chef Donald too.
Your experience being disconcerted seeing the pure little embroidery guy stuck in a gritty, lonely world is exactly in keeping with the intention of these indie little pixel guy games. It’s the bitterness that hides inside nostalgia. (“Look at what they did to all that precious innocence!”) I don’t endorse it, but do I get where it comes from.