You're on your own in a world full of danger. You can drink only if you discover water, survive the night only if you have a safe place to sleep - eat only what you have found or hunted. Explore a destroyed world and experience a dark story...

Explore your surroundings and gather the tools to keep yourself alive

Dead Man's Diary is a unique blend of elements from several genres. The gameplay adopts typical survival game mechanics such as crafting items or exploring a hostile world along with the need to find places to sleep or food. And enriches it with a gripping story and realistic puzzles.

Explore your surroundings and gather the tools to keep yourself alive. You start with a flashlight, with limited battery power, and if you want to survive you're going to need to find food and water. While there's plenty lying around your environment, unless you find a geiger counter you won't know if the food and drink you find is contaminated or safe to consume.

The environments are well detailed

Your first task is to find a geiger counter, which if you have "hints" turned on, is fairly straightforward. However, it's locked in a container and so you'll need to find a lock pick and a screwdriver and then use your lock picking skills to gain access.

Your next task to to build a fire and base camp. The fire, to cook food, and the camp, to allow you to sleep. To do this you'll need to collect a number of raw materials. Once again, this is fairly easy if you have "hints" activated. If you don't it can be a real pain wandering around and around the environment trying to stumble over the items you need.

And this was where the cracks started to show, for me. Whilst I'm all for large, open worlds where you're not handheld through the game, in Dead Man's Diary I couldn't help wishing for a bit more guidance. At times I felt like I was just going through the motions.

The gameplay adopts typical survival game mechanics

The environments are well detailed and the story rattles along nicely, but the constant roaming around started to get old a little too quickly. Another thing is make sure you save the game at very regular intervals. I died (my own stupid fault) and had to go right back to the part of the game where I was without a geiger counter. And wasting that much time having to repeat my past moves was more than a little irritating.

Overall, it's an engaging, challenging survival game, and if you're a fan of the genre you'll get quite a few hours of entertainment out of this.

6

Darren Rea