3/5 ★ – Javi0usly's review of The Red Lantern.

The Red Lantern is a dog sledding narrative survival game that features rogue-lite elements which keep you on your toes by randomizing what you encounter each time you start a run. You play as The Musher, a San Francisco native who left the city life behind with only a van and their dog, Chomper to pursue their dream of becoming [Solid Snake] err.. an Alaskan dog sledder who lives off the land. The goal of the game is to survive a treacherous journey across this valley to reach the Musher’s new home, but you’ll quickly find that nature can be as cruel as it is beautiful and embarking on a quest like this underprepared is a good way to get yourself killed. The introduction has you making stops at animal shelters, one by one to select the members of your sledding team. They play out in short vignettes where the musher observes the animal’s personality and it gives you a sense of what to expect in regards to how they may or may not be helpful on your journey. Each dog in your squad has an arc to complete along the way based on their wants and needs, and when you have completed one, a sticker of them gets added to your journal. Speaking of the journal - This is how the game tracks your progression. In it you’ll find multiple pages of goals and side quests to find and achieve. Like learning to “speak squirrel”. Completing these tasks fills the journal with the lessons you’ve learned, permanently unlocking extra supplies to start your runs with going forward, giving you a much better chance of reaching the cabin. Along with these upgrades, you’ll eventually stumble upon one of several tools randomly abandoned in the wild. These are also permanent additions to your loadout and total lifesavers in helping you survive - like the animal trap which lets you catch food in your sleep, or flint which makes collecting birchwood to start fires completely unnecessary. Like I mentioned, The Red Lantern is a Rogue Lite, and that means you’ll be taking a stab at reaching the goal, knowing full-well that you probably won’t make it for a good while, instead your initial set of attempts will be spent unlocking upgrades and gaining knowledge of how everything works. The game periodically asks you to decide whether to turn left or right along the path, which nudges the sled up or down on the map respectively. This lets you be a little bit strategic, aiming for specific areas or landmarks that you’d like to explore. After each fork in the road, you’ll be prompted with encounters that you can either choose to engage with or ignore and keep pushing forward. These are necessary stops if you want to make it, since they are where you will be able to gather food, supplies and complete objectives in your journal, but stopping also comes at the cost of a blip from your hunger meter - AKA: Your health bar. You’ll need to consistently take stock of how everyone is doing and how many resources you have on hand. Running out of bullets means you’re going to have a very hard time getting more food. Running out of food means you’ll...well...starve. Without birchwood you won’t be able to start a fire, without health packs you can’t heal wounds. There’s a risk/reward element to stopping for an encounter and with some experience you’ll begin to understand what to expect from each before making the decision of whether or not you want to go for it. It’s almost like you’re getting better at this whole outdoorsy survival thing! Your pack of dogs have their own life meter, which depletes as you pass trail markers. Find yourself with an empty tank on either and that’s the end of your run. Press X at any time to stop and set up camp, giving you an opportunity to warm up, eat some food and spend some quality time getting to know your fur babies. The actual gameplay mechanics are pretty simple. You really only select the actions you’d like to take from a menu and then watch them play out while using the right stick to observe your environment in the meantime, aside from a timing based shooting minigame where you need to wait for moving cursors to line up before pulling the trigger, and of course - fishing, which requires that you keep a lure in the zone until you catch something. While I know it sounds like this game may be too on rails to be all that enjoyable, I really do think that keeping it simple greatly benefitted the experience. I often equate narrative driven titles like the Telltale games as “choose your own adventure books” in video game form. But honestly, the actual gameplay between decision making is serviceable at best and what you’re really there for is to be put in interesting situations and make choices to see how it all plays out. The Red Lantern distills gameplay into just the decision making and in my opinion, it’s all the better for it. Think of it as a modern day text adventure but with pretty graphics and a ridiculous amount of context sensitive voice work provided by Ashly Burch, who carries this game on her shoulders. Providing a relatable performance that pulls you into the shoes of the protagonist. The heart of this game shines through in the Musher’s dialogue, which effectively projects their hopes, fears and determination. Unlike a lot of other multi-platform titles I’ve reviewed, The Red Lantern looks really great on the Switch. And while I’m sure there were visual downgrades here and there to get it running smoothly, the art direction is so strong that any sacrifices the devs may have had to make go mostly unnoticed. That being said, this game can be a little rough around the edges. I did experience some weird graphical errors every now and then, like the dogs riding straight through a piece of geometry, and at times the seam between sections of the game was clearly visible along the ground. It also suffers from pop in and the dog’s startup animation is almost always a little awkward with them moving before actually walking. Unfortunately, I also ran into issues where the game either refused to accept my inputs, forcing me to quit out or the software crashed entirely. Luckily the game is constantly auto-saving though, so I never lost much progress either way. It’s just a wrinkle that I hope gets ironed out soon. The Red Lantern is unlike anything I’ve ever played. As you play more and more, you’ll grow attached to your crew of super-cute puppies and begin to understand each of their unique quirks. It created situations where I felt the pressure of trying to keep myself and the gang alive against all odds. When you find yourself out of food and with only one bullet left, making that final shot count can be an incredibly high-stakes scenario. This story about a bold, adventurous leap into the unknown is something that I really connected with and I hope that other players will find it as engaging as I did.