Lifeline...

The gameplay of Lifeline centers on a concept that sounds absolutely horrible on paper; the basic idea is that you are in radio communication with a student named Taylor who is stranded in space after a crash, and the conversation takes place in real-time. That means that if you tell Taylor to go to sleep, you need to wait 8 hours for them to wake up before you can keep playing, at which point you'll get another text message; the game plays out through phone notifications like a WhatsApp conversation. That sounds like a recipe for a deeply disjointed experience, or even for outright boredom and irritation - and yet, by the time I worked out that you could turn it off, I didn't want to. Immense credit goes to the writer, Dave Justus, for that - I realised early that the tension of not knowing what's happening to Taylor, a character I found myself genuinely caring about, and the way the story plays on your mind when you're not playing it were a crucial part of how powerful this game is. There is (and I really can't avoid the terrible pun here) a tremendous sense of space about it; the gaps in the story really do give you time to ponder what could possibly go wrong, how the decisions you made earlier might come back to haunt Taylor, and what the hell they'll come across next. The game doesn't actually feed you too much information in the early days, which plays into all this; keeping things deliberately vague, setting the tone for creeping horror rather than showing your hand early, is all the better for letting your mind wander during that downtime.

If there's a criticism, I think it's a bit on the easy side. I only managed to kill Taylor once, and that particular scenario honestly felt a little bit cheap - I told them to sleep in an abandoned ship with a broken door and they froze to death. Other than that, it was relatively plain sailing, with my primary tactic best summarized as Not Being An Idiot, up until I got what I'm pretty certain is the best possible ending. On the other hand, that final day was intense as hell and there's every chance I might not have enjoyed the game quite as much if I had taken too long to get there. There's a balance to be struck there, between adding a little bit more to the branches of the story, not making it too long, and not sacrificing the way the radio silence gets under your skin; since this is the first game in a series that currently has seven entries, I guess I'll just have to go and find out if they managed to improve the formula. Based on this, a sterling first effort within quite an unusual and experimental format, I have confidence that they probably did.