The Red Lantern Critic Reviews

The pioneering protagonist is portrayed by the acclaimed Ashly Burch, and her vocal performance earnestly sells the entire premise.

Overall, The Red Lantern is a stunning game that offers a juxtaposition of being both a calming experience and one that can inspire a level of anxiety due to the more randomized nature of the mechanics. Watching that meter drop and feeling hope drop down with it can sometimes feel like a punch to the gut, but eventually a rhythm is found and relaxing around a campfire with a full belly, a warm fire, and adorable furry friends more than makes up for those dips in euphoria.

Overall The Red Lantern is worth your time if you have an interest in the outdoors, a lust for adventure in the unknown, or just want to pet some fluffy sled dogs.

A challenging and attractive narrative adventure with roguelite elements that deserves your attention despite its rough edges.

It can be breathtaking at times, and it can also be pretty banausic, but the Musher's journey to her new home has enough beauty, adventure, and adorable dogs I just don't want to stop petting to make each trip worthwhile.

Overall The Red Lantern is full of heart and charm, but with some disappointing execution that had much potential. The journey felt short, and I noticed a few bugs, at one point getting so bad I had to restart. I feel like it is too short to be $24.99. But if you love dogs, making choices, and the great Alaskan wilderness, this game would be worth picking up if on sale.

The Red Lantern has the certain indie game charm one may expect. Timberline Studio Inc. makes a decent first effort with a simple premise, good 'choose your own adventure' structure, and a cast of diverse dogs for your crew of five with a beautiful day and night cycle to top it off. Unfortunately, the title suffers from some dialogue and choice repetition and a few bugs or animations that could use some improvement.

Timberline Studio's debut game holds a lot of promise, with writing and animations that are both full to the brim with personality and wit. However, The Red Lantern's core game loop suffers from repetitive, punishingly random events that make the player feel passive and helpless to the whims of fate.

The Red Lantern is a survival game that gets some things right...and some things wrong. This is a game where players can marvel at the beauty of the Alaskan landscape, portrayed with stunning detail, and the characters' animation is executed with a great degree of authenticity. At the same time, the gameplay experience is constricting as the player has very little control over what happens, and the survival mechanisms end up too dependent on sheer luck, which raises the difficulty level to very frustrating levels.

The Red Lantern has a lot of faults and it's too repetitive. This is sad because in terms of plot it shows a lot of love for dogs.

I hoped The Red Lantern would grow on me with subsequent playthroughs, but, unfortunately the opposite was true due to the technical problems, design issues and repetitive dialogue. Those looking for a trip through Alaska or wanting to revisit bittersweet memories of traveling to Oregon, might want to check it out, but anyone on the hunt for a narrative-driven roguelite should skip it.

The Red Lantern is a suvival-roguelite where you will have to face the harsh landscapes of Alaska with your dog sled team. You can pet the dogs, but most of the action feels very much down to the luck of the dice rather than any active participation from you.

The Red Lantern's visuals and concept are appealing enough that, if the idea of a dog-sledding game sounds interesting, it can still provide a couple hours of laid-back, dog-petting gaming.

I know it's a tough gig being a game developer when hours played is a key metric and the pundits bleat on about content rather than things that are actually important, like thematic intensity or narrative depth. Taking something that could have been something special and diluting it to give those pundits something to throw onto their backlog isn't going to help video games develop as an art form, though. The Red Lantern upset me more than most; most games aren't made by people with the vaguest understanding of art. The Red Lantern, however, clearly is the concept of artists and the vision is compelling. Next time they should try delivering a game that supports the vision, rather than what they think will boost the Metacritic score.