The Red Lantern is an indie game about a failed doctor going out into the Alaskan wilderness to try her hand at becoming a musher and starving to death within three days. I’m being flippant, but I’m not joking. You pick out four dogs from a team of eight, you start out with one medkit, one kindling, two meat, and three bullets, and you quickly discover this is not nearly enough tools and supplies to survive the trip. Awakening from what turns out to be a nightmare, you decide to add about $30 worth of additional stuff to your sled before trying again. There’s no actual money in the game, I’m just roughly estimating the cost of two extra hunks of meat, an axe, some extra kindling, and exactly one additional bullet. In fairness, the meat hunks look pretty bulky, so I might be underestimating there. Still, the most valuable resource in the game is bullets, which look like they’re probably 30-06 Springfield ammo, which you can buy in boxes of 20 for $25. In fairness, the San Francisco med school dropout I’m playing as probably would not be able to deadeye snipe caribou with the reliability that I can win the little shooting minigame.
Once you start mushing, the dogs know the way, but you do choose to go left or right at various junctures and you get various encounters based on some combination of time of day, which choices you make, and random chance. I never kept careful track of my route, so I have no idea if you get the exact same encounters if you follow the exact same route (including camping at the same times so it’s the same time of day for each encounter). I tmight be completely deterministic or it might be completely random with your left-or-right decisions having no immediate impact whatsoever. Certainly, some parts of the map are labeled as having different animals from others. There’s moose country and there’s bear country, for example.
For the most part, you are making barely-informed decisions to go left or right and to either investigate or ignore different encounters (sometimes, but not always, it’s obvious what kind of encounter you’d be investigating, and sometimes the encounter investigates you) and hoping the game delivers enough resources to you to survive until you reach the cabin with the red lantern left out front, which your friend Margot has left for you. You do have a bit of control over what happens, by choosing whether to spend a precious point of hunger on pursuing an encounter with minimal information or ignoring it, holding out hope that you’ll get one that’s obviously a rabbit or bird or shockingly vulnerable moose that you can hunt so you won’t have to gamble on an encounter whose hook is something like “what was that noise?” and could end up being anything.
Given the game is a stealth Roguelike (but a short one, so I’ll forgive it) where you’re expected to fail multiple runs before succeeding, the main takeaway here seems to be “if you go to Alaska, you will die.” Not only is that the most likely result of your first run (and in fairness, that by itself is more “if you go to Alaska and refuse to spend an extra $50 on life-saving supplies, you will die”), a lot of the encounters are abandoned resources. Sometimes it’s a not-quite-empty box of bullets that might be litter, but sometimes it’s an abandoned axe or jacket, something where you wouldn’t expect the previous owner just lost track of it.
A run is held together with vignettes with one of your good boys. For example, in my first run, one of my dogs was Barkley. Barkley is a dog with a tendency to pick fights with wild animals no matter the odds, which I instantly felt a kinship with and decided this dog must be part of my sled team. While getting to grips with the game’s time and resource management, I wound up sledding through the dead of night, and I was attacked by a wolf. Barkley jumped in and fought the wolf long enough for me to grab my rifle and take advantage of my mysterious San Francisco med school dropout sniper powers. Later there’s another vignette where Barkley jumps in to intercept a squirrel aimed at my face, and decide to take the option to teach Barkley to bark at things before attacking them. This comes around when the sled is attacked by a tank on hooves while I have no bullets left, but Barkley manages to scare the elk off.
And then I died anyway. No bullets, no food, and still only about three-quarters of the way to the cabin. The game frames this as a nightmare that prompts the protagonist to buy the aforementioned $25 in additional supplies, but after the whole run with Barkley, it didn’t feel like a dream sequence. It felt like I died and reloaded. And then I died several more times. The threat of death does give the mechanics some teeth, but you have to build up a decent mastery of the game mechanics to make a successful run, figuring out which encounters are good or bad and which options in which encounters yield precious food and bullets and which waste a hunger point for nothing, slowly assembling an arsenal of survival tools and a decent starting amount of supplies. It does a pretty good job of making me feel like someone who’s getting to grips with surviving in the Alaskan wilderness, except that diegetically I am doing this through psychic nightmare visions.
I definitely think this would’ve been better as a sleddy-aroundy trading game (although not a complex one – the mechanics just don’t support more than 10-ish trips, tops, so the tertiary gameplay loop shouldn’t require more than that), though admittedly the problem there is that this is a pretty grounded story about a protagonist who feels like they’ve failed in life and are venturing into the snowswept wilderness to find themselves, and it would be weird to add into that story “just pretend that oil is shipped from the point of extraction to Anchorage in dog sleds.” But regardless, the game relies on a meta-structure of making multiple runs and slowly getting more familiar with the Alaskan wilderness as you do, and that’s good, but it does this by giving you a goal and so few starting supplies that you are basically guaranteed to die and have to restart multiple times before you succeed, and that’s bad.
The game is saved by its brevity, though. Each of the eight dogs has a different story you can play through (like Barkley’s) if you want, and that might take 4 or 5 hours, but just getting to the cabin alive only takes about 3, and that was long enough that the sense of wonder at the Alaskan wilderness the game was trying to convey hadn’t quite worn off by the time I got to the end.
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