Dead Man’s Diary Review

Dead Man’s Diary is a survival game with story and puzzle elements, developed by TML-Studios and released on Steam on March 30, 2022. Having put some time into this post-apocalyptic world, there have been moments that showed the game’s potential and vision, but unfortunately most other areas fell short. The level of detail in the environments has been well crafted and you can imagine the hustle and bustle of life before a major catastrophe that’s now turned the landscape barren and streets abandoned.

Fifteen years after this catastrophe, you play a man with no name as supplies are running desperately low, forcing you to venture out of your shelter. Devoid of human life, you must survive with very little hand holding and must always maintain your health and radiation levels as your health slowly ticks down. It is a dark environment to walk around, and I found the ambience interesting. You would hear little noises that pierced the darkness making you stop in your tracks to look around for what caused it. Despite this sense of uneasiness, I found that there is a lot of wandering around with no real challenge. You go around looking for loot to build things like a camp.

There is no in-game map, so you are guided only by your own memory of where you have been, and it made exploring further from the shelter riskier. This is not a bad game aspect if you are trying to capture that true sense of survival where you have no idea where you are in the world. However, the game is not as open world as I would have liked it to be in this setting as I experienced some invisible walls as I explored. I also thought the voice acting of the main character didn’t capture the suspense well enough, coming across as cringy and I felt no connection to them which distracted me from the immersion.

The inventory management is its biggest let down in the game. I understand to a point what they are trying to do; embrace the resourceful side of your brain to gather only what you need to progress to different stages of your survival needs. But implementing that system without other entertaining aspects of the game made for a boring, time-consuming experience. The gameplay beyond the tutorial felt monotonous and not enough to keep me engaged in wanting to play for long periods.

The true survival aspects of game like food became a chore and you had no reasonable likelihood of survival. It needed more work arounds than just the one option to feed yourself or cleanse the radiation. I think with survival games you must have mechanics that make you resourceful and want to gather items to make into tools to survive with or use them in unique ways to get around a problem. The developers just haven’t been able to fully capture it and unfortunately that makes the game feel lack lustre and boring to play.

I hope the devs take the criticisms constructively and make some solid engaging changes that brings players back to have another crack at surviving in the world they have created. Two major patches have been released so far adding extended hints in the early game as well as adjusting the lighting levels as it was far too dark. Hopefully with time and more feedback, Dead Man’s Diary could have potential to return to.

This review utilised a key provided by Visibility and Dead Man’s Diary is available now on Steam.

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