The Red Lantern Review

[Eliwood8]

Some people feel the call of the wild to get out into nature, leaving behind modern society for a bit and reconnecting with the simple joys and challenges of the great outdoors. Not me, I stay inside and play video games all day, so if you're like me you can get a taste of nature with The Red Lantern, a roguelike survival game about one woman's trek across the Alaskan wilderness with her dog sled team. Although the game establishes a decent setting for an invigorating return to nature, the actual adventure is much less thrilling here.

 

You play as a woman who has left behind the city to pursue a dream of dog sled racing. In the opening moments of the game you'll pick out your team of dogs, then you're off on a majestic, snowy, and rather lonely adventure filled with peril as you struggle to keep your dogs and yourself safe. Although there are copious amounts of dialogue—voiced by Ashly Burch—The Red Lantern is a pretty introspective, thoughtful story about trying new things and testing your limits. It's an engaging theme that isn't really explored fully in the game though, mostly due to clashes with the gameplay. The repetitive nature of a roguelike makes the introspective moments feel a little cheaper since you hear them over and over, and the survival aspect of the game just makes the protagonist seem like kind of an idiot for journeying into the Alaskan wilderness with just three bullets in her rifle and enough tinder for exactly one fire. On the brightside though, each dog is given a slightly different personality and side story, and discovering all of them is a cute touch.

 

 

The name of the game here is survival. Your goal is your new home, a cabin with a red lantern, but to get there you'll need to spend a few days traversing snowy fields, forests, and even frozen lakes/rivers. As you travel your dogs will tire out, and when you stop to investigate things, collect supplies, hunt wild animals or deal with unexpected predators, your own hunger meter will also decline, forcing you to eventually stop, set up camp, and eat/rest. Balancing your very meager resources can be a struggle at first, but the game mercifully allows for progress between failed attempts (within the story, failed attempts are treated as nightmares the protagonist has before setting out on the journey, which is a pretty clever touch). The more you see/do the more supplies you'll start with on your next attempt, and you can even pick up helpful equipment like a trap for catching animals instead of hunting them and spending bullets.

 

Overall it's a decent roguelike survival formula that forces you to pretty much always be playing on the edge of failure, which adds a lot of tension, but too much of the experience seems to come down to luck. Random events in a survival game definitely keep you on your toes, but it can also be extremely frustrating when you repeatedly cannot find something as simple as tinder for building a fire. You can manage your resources as perfectly as you possibly can, but if you just don't run into animals to hunt you'll inevitably run out of food. Granted, one successful runthrough of The Red Lantern is quite short so you're meant to try and fail a lot and just roll with the punches, but it makes for a pretty discouraging gameplay loop. In other roguelikes you often get further on each attempt because you've gotten better at the game's mechanics; here it feels like you only get further because you got lucky.

 

 

The element of chance is only exacerbated by the bafflingly odd shooting mechanic. When you do encounter an animal like a caribou, you'll enter a mini-game of sorts where you have a brief window of time to shoot. There will be two circles bouncing across the screen, and you'll want to fire when the two overlap. The only controls you have are to shoot or to hold your breath which slightly slows down one of the circles. It's an obnoxiously clumsy system to begin with, especially in a game where both your bullets and the potential meat you can collect from the animal are so scarce and precious, but there were also times where the circles were lined up just fine and yet I still missed, or I triggered an event where the first bullet didn't kill the animal so I'd have to hope I ran into it again later. That kind of blind luck just doesn't feel good in a game where failure is so common. And even when things are going well for you, the gameplay can feel pretty repetitive. The first several encounters of any playthrough are usually pretty similar and very quickly it feels like you're just going through the motions with The Red Lantern.

 

The game's presentation is at least pretty solid. It has a sort of simple, painterly art style that is beautifully barren, blanketed in snow and lit by the shifting sunlight (you can also continue sledding at night though I have to say that seems like a terrible idea in real life). The developers managed to put a lot of personality into scenery that is relatively undetailed; the emptiness is the point. That said, the emptiness can also get a bit boring after the seventh or eighth attempt. As already mentioned, Ashly Burch voices the game and does a good job of adding personality to the nameless protagonist, though again hearing the same lines every playthrough gets to be pretty tiresome.

 

 

The Red Lantern offers a uniquely challenging trek across the Alaskan wilderness, but the luck-based, randomized events might be to the game's detriment. It's understandable to make a survival game challenging, but losing a run for what feels like events completely outside of your control never feels good, and the game's repetitive nature makes each run a bit too much like the last. If you really want to pet some virtual sledding dogs you can give this game a try, but the gameplay is unlikely to keep you coming back for more than a handful of playthroughs, which adds up to only a couple of hours.

 

Rating: 5 out of 10 Dogs