Dead Man’s Diary is released for PS5. We haven’t had the opportunity to review the Steam/Xbox version yet so this is our maiden voyage in the post-apocalyptic world created by the makers of Bus Simulator.
The shortest straw
Dead Man’s Diary has a great premise. A mad guy was able to rig all the nuclear bombs sheltered in the world to detonate at once in the event of his death. He decided if he died, everybody should die. The lucky few who found shelter survived but for the most part, the world as we knew it was long gone. You were one of those lucky ones but sadly your luck is about to change. The shelter you were in was stocked with supplies but as time went on these dwindled making them insufficient to provide for everybody. To keep it fair the sheltered community decided people should leave in the hopes of upping the survival chances of those staying in the bomb shelter. Deciding who would be exiled from the shelter was done by picking straws. Whoever took the shortest straw had to leave. The game starts with you being the one whose luck has dried up. Left to the perils of a post-apocalyptic world, you must find a way to survive.
Hunter Gatherer
To survive you’ll need to provide for your own basic needs by finding shelter, making sure you drink water and eat some food and keeping your vitals like temperature and radiation sickness in check. Failing to do one of these will result in an untimely death. This introduces the one mechanic you’ll do repeatedly in Dead Man’s Diary, gather supplies. Building a fire to cook food and building a place to sleep will be necessary in each new area you’ll pass through. Finding all the right material to fulfill this task starts as being fun but gets old really fast. You’ll have to look in every nook and cranny to find the necessary supplies often missing out if you go over a certain area too fast. Meticulously scanning each pixel in the game to actually progress in the game is made way too tedious in this game. At some point, it actually enraged me to find out I needed to backtrack the whole current map in order to find one last bundle of hay to make my bed. This felt way too much like a chore instead of a fun game.
To further add to my bundled-up rage towards this game, the game makes no sense at all. Walking around the map depletes all your vital gauges making it necessary to constantly keep on the lookout for food and water. In Dead Man’s Diary one does not simply collect food… You have to check it with the Geiger counter to make sure the radiation didn’t spoil it. This process adds to the lore of the game but is implemented so clunky to the point the game froze a few seconds every time I whipped out the Geiger counter. Somehow I had only room for 3 water bottles but plenty of room for a bunch of metal rods, bundles of hay and wood to make my camp. To top things off, every time you go to a new area, your inventory is back empty because you couldn’t take stuff with you.
Puzzles and strange noises
To get from one area to another in Dead Man’s Diary, you’ll often have to solve puzzles. These range from combination locks to hacking military computers. These puzzles are made hard for a video game with knowledge of binary and other classic puzzle-solving mechanics required. I’m rather good at those things but I can imagine a lot of people needing a helping hand from the internet to get through some of these. A few hints here and there instead of keeping it vague as it is now, would’ve come in handy. The game does a good job of giving you a sense of desolation with its level design. For most of the game, you’ll walk around alone with some eery sound effects hinting towards something dangerous lurking around you. The first few times the game focuses on these potential extra pair of eyes on you, you feel chased but after these “jump-scares” get repeated a bit too much you’ll take no notice anymore. That is until the story progresses and new information comes to light.
Clunky controls
I already mentioned the Geiger counter situation but that is not all… Everything about the controls is clunky. The menus are a mess to get around to. Jumping, running, ducking and crawling are not laid out well on the controls. Every time I needed to execute one of those actions I felt like just hitting random buttons to get to the right action by trial and error. Inventory management in a game so prone to constantly be on the lookout for supplies is almost impossible to navigate. The game feels like it was released without being tested properly. This PS5 release comes more than a year after being released on Steam/Xbox and has the same problems already mentioned with the earlier releases.
Conclusion
Dead Man’s Diary is a poorly made game and should be avoided if you plan to enjoy your gaming experience. Shame this game wasn’t made better than this because it started quite promising but went downhill after the first 10 minutes of gameplay and never recovered.
