Paul’s Preeminent PlayStation Plus Purge – Lone Survivor

I’d never survive in an actual post-apocalyptic universe. That’s just the harsh truth, one that I’ve come to terms with long ago. There’d be mutated monsters stalking the streets, high levels of radiation eating away at our health, and my bone-dry skeleton curled up inside a bathtub because I couldn’t even bother to try to scavenge for food and water and decided that lying down and closing my eyes for forever was the easier path. Also, if the monsters are even the teeniest bit speedy, I’ll never make it due to…well, cardio.

And that brings us to the ever-so-cheery and delightful Lone Survivor from Jasper Byrne, which is a post-apocalyptic survival horror game with retro-styled 2D graphics and a somber-yet-sick-as-all-gets soundtrack. Please note that Jasper Byrne also contributed to Hotline Miami‘s soundtrack. Well, in this disease-ridden world, the player controls a nameless man-boy, who wears a medical mask, and…well, I don’t honestly know what this person’s true journey is, his desires. He may very well only be following directions provided to him via apparent hallucinations, telling him to go check out this room or that room or use violence to take out the monsters. For me, the clear and only goal was to survive, and exploring the spooky, grimy apartment building you are currently stuck in will reveal a staggering amount of special items, weapons, door keys, pills, notes, and a bunch of different types of food to help in this endeavor.

Lone Survivor is kind of like a point-and-click adventure game, but you also have a pistol and can blast monsters with bullets until they stop moving while trying to keep your hunger, thirst, and sanity meters in check, sleeping now and then too. Still, many of the items you find can be used on other items to solve a specific logic-based puzzle; for instance, early on, you find a pair of scissors and, later, when your passage is blocked by a bulging mass of flesh, you know exactly how to use them. You can also combine items together and even cook food for better results. Otherwise, you’re exploring the nearby hallways and rooms, hiding from or killing monsters, while trying to piece together what is happening and maybe looking for a way out. Your apartment, which has a bed, radio, and stove, acts as a mini-hub, which you can return to using magical mirrors and save your progress.

Silent Hill 2‘s influence here is clear. For one, there’s a man you meet in your dreams with a cardboard box on his head that will probably get you thinking about other men with oddly-shaped heads. Similar to James Sunderland’s quest to find his wife, you are running around a spooky apartment building brimming with locked doors, where things aren’t always what they seem to be. Also, there’s a terrible map system here, just like in Silent Hill 2, and I found myself getting lost constantly, unsure of where to actually go for main and side quest purposes. I’d rather have a blank map that allowed me to annotate it myself than try to parse someone else’s notes on it. Lastly, the shooting is almost purposefully clunky, which means you have to decide early on if you want to waste ammo or use chunks of rotting meat to distract monsters.

Evidently, your interactions with the game’s world and inhabitants result in different endings upon completion of Lone Survivor. Immediately, this stressed me out. I mean, it’s not like this is competing with Chrono Trigger or NieR: Automata in terms of number of endings, but still, now I’m over-thinking every choice I make, like whether or not I should take the green pill before bed because I desperately need batteries to proceed but this might affect the ending I get. Gaah. Given that a single playthrough takes around four to six hours to see credits roll, I most likely will only ever see one ending for this game, and it won’t be any time soon as I’ve already uninstalled it from my PlayStation 3, giving up after an hour or two of meandering back and forth, growing hungrier and more insane by the minute, not sure of why I have these items in my inventory or their ultimate purpose or how to even cook food.

Thankfully, if I ever do want to give Lone Survivor another mighty swing of the horror stick, I have a second copy on Steam, ready to go. Or I could return to Soul Brother, one of Byrne’s earlier projects, and a lighter one at that, if my goal is to feel enlightened instead of devoured.

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Oh look, another reoccurring feature for Grinding Down. At least this one has both a purpose and an end goal–to rid myself of my digital collection of PlayStation Plus “freebies” as I look to discontinue the service soon. I got my PlayStation 3 back in January 2013 and have since been downloading just about every game offered up to me monthly thanks to the service’s subscription, but let’s be honest. Many of these games aren’t great, and the PlayStation 3 is long past its time in the limelight for stronger choices. So I’m gonna play ’em, uninstall ’em. Join me on this grand endeavor.

Soul Brother’s puzzle platforming life is but a brief tenure

I have two copies of Jasper Byrne’s Lone Survivor in my collection, one on the PC and the other my PlayStation 3, and I’m scared to play either. Y’all should know this by now, but I’m terrible when it comes to horror games or even games with just a slight hint of horror. I don’t like walking around a corner in real life and getting scared when something jumps out at me, and I like it even less in videogames. This is why it took me years to play through Silent Hill 2. Strangely, I’m mostly okay with horror films, as I’m not in control and just along for the ride, though some, such as The Gate or The Blair Witch Project, continue to give me nightmares to this very day. Thankfully, Soul Brother, which is one of Byrne’s earlier works, is a more lighthearted adventure, despite all the forced suicide.

You play as one Mr. Soul, a spirit that can body hop from creature to creature upon death. This spectral form is on a quest for wisdom and understanding, and to find that, it’ll have to navigate a weird, maze-like landscape, using the body and skills of the bodies it inhabits to make progress. Different bodies will help in unique ways, such as the bird Birdie that can hover across long stretches or the cat Nemo who can double jump. Mr. Soul also needs to avoid enemies on screen, floating saw blades, and pits of spikes because this colorful, kaleidoscopic realm is full of danger, while also trying to collect every gem of wisdom along the way. It’s the only way to understand reincarnation, naturally.

Soul Brother is free to play in your browser over at Adult Swim’s gaming site. I’ve enjoyed other titles from there before, such as Insidia and Winnose. Just search Grinding Down if you want to know more. Anyways, this retro platformer is just as good and kooky, with enough challenge to stop you for a bit in several rooms as you noodle out a solution to make it out alive or, in some cases, kill yourself in the most strategic way possible. The arrow keys move your character left and right, and the X button is for jumping, which changes based on the body Mr. Soul is currently occupying.

Alas, I did not collect all the gems of wisdom. There’s 33 in total, and I grabbed about 8 or 9 before moving on to the end. Thankfully, you don’t need to collect all (or any) of the gems to reach a higher plane, but they are there if you’re looking for an extra challenge or goal. Evidently some gems are also tucked away in hidden rooms. At the end, you are rewarded with fruit pick-ups from a multi-limbed green entity based on a number of different attributes, like time completed and how often you had to reincarnate. I suspect getting all the gems would give you something really good here, but that’s just me speculating. I was content with my pixelated pear and orange.

I can’t end this post on Soul Brother without touching on its soundtrack. It’s so full of bounce and pep that it is in complete contradiction with the idea of killing yourself to be reborn in a better body. The soundtrack makes me want to live more in my original body, to get up and move, to nod my head as I wiggle my heads. Truthfully, I’ve been listening to it on full repeat as I wrote this post. There’s a bunch of thick drum and bass, crunchy electronica, wonky synth action, and just enough odd sound effect sampling to keep you on your toes. Warning: these great tunes may get in your way of successful platforming.

Lastly, I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I look at my cats every day and do think they have it pretty good. So, if push comes to shove, I’d like to be reborn as a furry friend for a nice human, where the biggest concern of my day isn’t avoiding swinging saw blades but rather finding the most perfect slant of sunlight and taking a nap in it. Right meow please.

Save your daughter and as many flashlight batteries as possible in Ascension

Bundles, bundles, bundles–you can’t turn right without walking into one these days. That can be, at times, a bit annoying, especially when one has wallet issues or an ever-growing backlog, but the latest bundle shouldn’t be a problem for anyone with a working computer: The Free Bundle. Yup, that’s right. Free. No minimum, no “beat the average price” tier rewards. Just a list of some indie games and the buttons to download them. Currently up are six games, of which I’ve downloaded the four I’m most interested in: Ascension, Celestial Mechanica, Abobo Big’s Adventure, and Treasure Adventure Game.

For today’s post, I’ll be talking about the first one mentioned there. Before I begin, I have to state that I think it has an unfortunately generic name, as Googling “Ascension” brings up a rather popular CCG or talk of the forthcoming God of War: Ascension. Nothing for the indie game comes up on the first page of results certainly. Oh, and there’s totally an XBLA indie game of the same name out there. Ultimately, I think Atticus Ascends would have been a better title, but that’s just me. Otherwise, it’s hard to track anything down about the little indie horror stab in the dark. To get the screenshot above, I had to navigate to the developer’s website, and even then there was not much in the form of media, but that’s just a small gripe from my perspective. If I was to ever do a second post on the game, I’d have to take screenshots as I played for myself–the true horror!

Ascension is surprisingly good. Well, at least I was surprised at the quality of the gameplay, the look, the controls. Just about everything, except the story, which is kind of by-the-books. It’s a psychological horror game where you play as groundskeeper Atticus, who has brought his sick daughter Viola (or is it Violet?) to work on the day of a terrible accident. Separated from her, he must find his way back before something else reaches her first–dun dun dunnn. You control Atticus, wandering floors of some building, reading notes left by others, searching for items, like flashlight batteries and key cards, and avoiding zombie-like monsters by sneaking past them in the darkness. Or maybe killing them with an axe; I’ve not yet figured that part out.

The game has a really nice look to it. Cartoonish, painterly at times, but capable of style, with great lighting effects from your flashlight, especially when it begins to dim and weaken from low batteries. A nice touch. All text is dished out in a lackluster typewriter font, with the typewriter sounds to boot, which leads me to question who is telling the story here: Atticus or an unknown author. Some scenes, like saving your game or speaking with your daughter, are presented in a larger shot than traditional gameplay. These are nicely done and help give more dimension to the characters. In the end, I just wish there was a map. Lone Survivor had one, even if it was a riff on Silent Hill 2‘s apartment building maps. It helped nonetheless.

I played up to the part where Atticus has to navigate through the Cold Storage area. Without a map, I quickly became lost after so many hallways and doors, and then the monsters kept killing me despite the ax I was wielding. Holding your breath only works if they haven’t seen you, so the moment you are spotted, it’s kind of over. Death isn’t a complete end, but it does throw you out of the loop for a bit. I might hop back into it again and try once more; I don’t expect it to be a very long game, but I might need to read up some more on how the combat works because I don’t think I have it down well enough to survive. Anyways, again, Ascension is good and free, so go download it from the Free Bundle (31 days to go!) or the developer’s website. And conserve your batteries; I mean it.