// Summer In The Winter Time //

I can’t tell which I like more: Whale Trail’s hypnotic, happy-go-lucky gameplay, or it’s amazing pop song composed by Gruff Rhys. It’s a game that’s been done before (It’s basically jetpack joyride on LSD), but no one has pulled it off as stylishly and tight as ustwo.

The game is simple: Willow the whale is constantly flying to the right of the screen. Touch the screen to make Willow go up (Hold it down for long enough to make Willow do a backwards loop-de-loop), and don’t touch anything to make him go down. Navigate through the dark storm cloud, and collect the stars to go into an invincible frenzy mode. Collecting bubbles keeps your magic trail up, and touching the storm clouds makes it go down; If your trail hits zero, you fall. Seriously, that’s it, and I can’t get enough.

The aspect that makes Whale Trail to enjoyable is its euphoric presentation. I find myself uplifted after a miserable day by its visuals and its catchy audio. It’s a gorgeous little app that snags your attention immediately, and has you humming like a jack-ass down the sidewalk after playing it on the bus… No joke, it’s happened.

Luckily, to keep add some replay value into its infinite flying main game, Ustwo has added a challenge mode. Complete challenges and get rewarded by stars. You achieve more stars the better you perform. It’s a nice side addition that gives you some structured direction and progression.

You can buy Whale Trail on the App Store for $0.99 even. It’s the best buck I’ve spent in ages.

Check out the official music video below, as for me… I’m hopping on the Whale Trail.

// Nostalgia Vs Modernity //

SuperFlat’s Lone Survivor has one foot firmly planted in early 1980′s nostalgia, and the other in modern survival horror appeal. It’s retro-aesthetic mingles surprising well with the survival horror gameplay, and it’s physiological story elements are engrossing and startling. This is a game borne from simplicity, which develops unexpected complexity that evokes a rich range of emotions, but mostly terror.

// Minimalistic Atmosphere //

At its core, Lone Survivor is a retro side-scroller with classic pixelated graphics. The surprising thing about this is how well it accomplishes a terrifying atmosphere. The desolated, corroding, dripping, corridors do an amazing job at eliciting fear from the player. It’s funny, I had trouble determining what exactly was hanging from the wall, or pooling on the floor, but I knew it was something disgusting and fowl. These pixelated blurs are just as unsettling as high-definition gore because my imagination was actively filling in the blanks. Also, the enemies movements are taken straight from Silent Hill’s monsters, which seem to be experiencing convulsions. The game also has some disturbing visual effects that are determined by your character’s sanity: The background will shake, the screen will tear and crinkle, and your character will even fall to his knees and have nervous breakdowns. All of these graphical tricks helped keep me unsettled and claustrophobic. While Lone Survivors graphical components help lend to the fear and atmosphere, the true key to fear is in the audio.

The audio in Lone Survivor greatly resembles Akira Yamaoka’s work in previous Silent Hill titles. The sound design is a pallet of wet footsteps, thumping hearts, distorted screams, and sounds that resemble a utility room on the fritz. Nothing is more terrifying than hearing your isolated footsteps interrupted by a scream, only to followed by the growing sounds of distortion that signify your doom. Overtop of all this atmospheric propelling audio, there’s a remarkable soundtrack. This score breaks away from the traditional MIDI soundtracks that are usually associated with retro side-scrollers. Individual characters and locations have their own themes composed by Jasper Byrne himself, which greatly influence the overall feel of the game.

// Better Hide //

The gameplay is a mixed bag. The game relies on the player to navigate an over the top map in a 2D game space. It can be disorienting and perplexing at first. I found myself breaking out the map quite a bit (Which you need to find before using in every area). This wouldn’t have been an issue if I didn’t have monsters on my tail around every corner. Luckily backtracking isn’t a huge issue due to the games fast travel system: Mirrors. The player can travel back to their room by looking deeply into a mirror, which also gives you an assessment of your mental health through dialogue. Keep in mind that you may only use the mirror in your room to travel to the previous mirror you just used. Overall, the navigation works but there’s a small learning curve to it.
Once you get the hang of navigating the world, the next step is bypassing the “infected”. The character can hide in the background of the screen, but you can only hide in specific indented areas. You can lay rotten meat to lure the monsters in order to hide and sneak by. My main issue with this mechanic is the confounding lack of hiding places in the game. I found myself relying on my sidearm and flares rather than being the stealth suave player that the game wanted me to be. Unfortunately, ammo is scarce, and the gunplay is stiff and restricting. Although, this can be frustrating, I found my fear and stress levels rise due to it. If the game was a continuous gun battle, the tension would be nonexistent. I could genuinely see the Silent Hill influences in the combat, which leant to the defenseless feel of old school, survival horror games. This being said, I believe that the level design should have been created around the stealth aspects, and the gunplay should have been left as a last resort. Overtime the abundance of enemies became tedious and distracting. I found myself being forced to clear halls with my pistol, especially ones that required a bit of continuous backtracking.

// A Man And His Mirror //

The driving force for me was the story. You begin with a simple goal: get out of the apartment complex and find companions. This mission gets muddled quickly as reality begins to distort, and the protagonist begins to lose his grip on reality. Characters are introduced through hallucinations and dreams, and you quickly begin to wonder who’s real and who’s a figment of your imagination. It’s a twist that’s been done before, but it still keeps things interesting. Fortunately, your sanity isn’t a static, scripted set piece. It’s determined by how well you take care of yourself. It wavers if you don’t eat properly, or if you don’t sleep enough. It’s one of Lone Survivor’s more intriguing characteristics, and the mystery of what’s real and what’s not kept me coming back for more.
Maintaining your sanity is largely based on item management. Riffling through your inventory to combine, cook, and eat food is essential to staying mentally healthy. When it came to the inventory screen, I ached for mouse support and a grid setup, but the overall layout inventory layout could have been supported by an NES controller. I’m assuming this decision was made to imitate the retro inventory systems of old. It works, but it feels clunky and cumbersome.

// The Bottom Line //

Lone Survivor is a discomforting take on survival horror, with emphasis on the survival. It only takes around 2-3 hours to beat, so it’s not a major time investment. It’s an interesting play through, even though the combat is lacking, and the enemies are repetitive and monotonous. The atmosphere and story elements will keep your interested to the end, and it shows that pixelated graphics can still be atmospherically effective and unnerving. Play Lone Survivor for the atmosphere and story elements; don’t play it for the gunplay.

You can buy it here for $10.00, and it’s currently lined up for a Steam release.

And you can buy the amazing sound track from Jasper Byrne’s BandCamp, for $6.99.