You know, there is an easy way to do horror. All you have to do is make the environment in which the player stumbles around dark, make visibility low and finally (and this is the clever part), have the chosen monstrosity leap out suddenly accompanied by some hideous shriek.  Although this technique might very well provoke a split-second reaction from the player, who may produce a sort of, ‘waah’ noise on occasion, it doesn’t make a game scary. It makes a game jumpy, and jumpy and scary are two disparate things. I like to call this brand of horror ‘dumb horror’.

A clever horror game doesn’t rely on cheap startles to disturb the player. A clever horror game can frighten the player in far more lasting, effective and sophisticated ways. Lone Survivor, an indie game developed by Jasper Byrne and available on Steam (and soon on PSN) is a clever horror game.

The protagonist is an unfortunate unnamed man with a surgical mask, a stuffed cat and little else who is forced to leave the claustrophobic safety of his apartment to scavenge for food in a tower block that has been ravaged by an unknown sickness that turns its victims into revolting, twitching horrors. The protagonist, who appears to be the only survivor, reluctantly navigates the once familiar environment for anything edible whilst being hampered by exhaustion and his deteriorating mental health.

The game blends a retro-style, 2D presentation with an excellent soundtrack and intuitive gameplay. Our ill-fated protagonist has the choice of either hiding from the shambling mutants by cowering in the shadows and leaving rotten meat as bait, or combating them with a pistol. However, ammo is predictably scarce and as a result, a trigger-happy player will soon find himself at the mercy of the shuddering creatures that inhabit the apartment block. The majority of the game is spent searching through the apartments, solving puzzles and avoiding a grim, unpleasant death.

Lone Survivor doesn’t attempt to startle the player and it doesn’t elicit the kind of adrenaline-pumping scares that I referred to in my article on Condemned. Where this game shines (perhaps shines is the wrong word) is in the atmosphere it conjures. The protagonist is completely alone and assumedly has been for months before he ran out of food. He is exhausted, starving, terrified and on the verge of insanity. His intense hunger forces him to eat whatever horrible food he happens to happen across, which can be anything from ‘delicious ham’ to ‘squid on a stick’. His lack of nutrition means that he is constantly fatigued, and his persistent lack of energy means that he shifts around the blood-soaked apartment building in a sleep-deprived haze whilst being plagued by hallucinations.

On occasion, the main character will stumble across people who aren’t looking to turn him into a rug, but those moments in the game are perhaps the most frightening. It’s through his interactions with other characters that Lone Survivor really knuckles down and tries to instil doubt in the player. The infrequent NPCs act in odd, fragmented ways as if they aren’t experiencing the same misery the protagonist is. This is epitomised by a truly unnerving scene involving a grossly inappropriate party, which actually forced me to pause the game and have a little bit of a contemplative breather.

The player’s experience of the horrific, post-apocalyptic world the game is set in has to be perceived through the filter of the protagonist’s budding madness. Months and months without human contact whilst being on the brink of starvation have left him incredibly warped. He wears a surgical mask that looks like a continuous, toothy, Cheshire cat grin. He has conversations with a stuffed cat called ‘Plush’. His reactions to grotesque events are fragmented and wrong. As well as fearing the monstrous creatures outside the apartment, the main character’s tortured demeanour make the player unsure of him too. As a result, there is nothing certain for the player to hold on to. The unpredictable nature of the narrative, which will have confusing visions disorientating the player through-out, mean that there is no comfy routine to settle into. In most horror games, the initial fright of whatever threatens your safety is marred considerably when you grow accustomed to it. Lone Survivor, with its unstable protagonist, never gives the player the chance to grow accustomed to anything, so its effect never wains through-out the relatively short but hugely satisfying play-through.

In many ways, Lone Survivor is reminiscent of the better Silent Hill games. It involves a questionable, untrustworthy main character isolated in a despair-sodden location, and like the venerable horror-series, on occasion it effectively disgusts the player with its icky, gruesome nature. Apart from the genuinely sickening mutants, who convulse and shuffle their way along corridors whilst being backed by panic-inducing noises, the protagonist is forced into horrific situations, such as one memorable moment thankfully left largely to the imagination in which he is called upon to cut through a skin-covered tunnel with a pair of scissors. He didn’t enjoy it.

Lone Survivor is a unique, intelligent and compelling survival-horror game. I suppose the message of the second addition to the ‘Horror Show’ feature is that if you’re jaded by the many triple-A games that are released under the guise of horror but ultimately disappoint, there are games being made that unnerve successfully. One of these games is Lone Survivor.

I’m a huge horror fan and I want to cover as many terrifying games as possible. If you have any recommendations for games that I could include in my Horror Show feature, please get in touch. Either leave a comment below, or contact me on Twitter or message me on Tumblr (http://whatsjoebuildinginthere.tumblr.com) or drop me an email at

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