I Am Alive

Game isn't great but it is uniqe, ypu are a normal guy searching his family after a year of apocalypse.

Climbing is stamina based and since you are a normal person you can't climb forever, you need to be carefull about your stamina management because there isn't much supplies around. But this is not a survival game so even on hardest difficulty if you are carefull you won't have to worry.

Combat is the second uniqe mechanic because I haven't seen this in a game. Character doesn't know how to fight so if you are sorruended (nearly everytime) by bandits you are dead. So you need a gun to even the numbers but ammo is rare.

Things I don't like about the game is lack of story about our character, I don't even knows his name and other things is black and white filter.

If you play this, look into the history surrounding it & the development cycle. It's fucking weird & really interesting, and it enhanced my enjoyment of the game a lot. It's neat, get it on sale.

An underrated and regretfully unfinished post-earthquake survival work

7.5/10

Opening

Today, when most players mention post-apocalyptic survival games, they usually think of two categories: the nuclear wasteland created by the Fallout and Metro series, or the zombie waves rendered in games like The Last of Us and Days Gone. It is rare to find a survival game like I Am Alive, set against the backdrop of earthquakes, a natural disaster that is both common and has a huge impact in our real world. As a game released in 2012, I Am Alive attracted countless players back then with its unique gloomy gray art style, critical thinking on human morality, and extremely hardcore gameplay mechanism. It is still worth a try even today and definitely could be considered a greatly underrated survival action game. However, due to the extremely difficult development process, the final release was only equivalent to the prologue of other games. The unsatisfactory sales directly sentenced this promising IP to death, making it ultimately a regrettable unfinished work.

Strength

Players must explore Haventon, a fictional American city after a massive earthquake. The heavy and depressing atmosphere vividly reflects the fragility and helplessness of human beings in the face of natural disasters. Instead of taking the role of an omnipotent superhero in traditional video games, players control an ordinary person. Every action consumes stamina, supplies are extremely limited, and every move must be considered twice. The city is crisscrossed with broken walls and abandoned buildings, climbing is the only way out. The player's limited stamina and the extreme stamina consumption rate when climbing requires precise route planning and resting points identification. If you move forward blindly at all costs, at best you will burn up the stamina limit that can only be restored by limited resources, having an irreversible impact on the entire exploration; at worst, you will directly fall to death from exhaustion. The tension and challenges are consistently high throughout the game. Players will also encounter a variety of survivors in the game, some of whom will treat you warmly, while others will show their weapons and warn you to leave. The vast majority of the remaining ones are gang members with ulterior motives. They come in groups and press forward step by step, just wanting to plunder you. As your stamina is depleted and enemies close in, the game's music will gradually intensify, with increasingly tight drum beats creating an eerie and terrifying feeling, giving the player an excellent sense of tension and fear.

The overall process of the game is primarily linear, and the downtown area of Haventon is designed to be semi-open, with many victims and supplies for players to explore. The combat mechanism is also quite unique. Players often have to face multiple enemies, in addition to pretending to surrender and catching them off guard, you can also raise your guns to intimidate knife-wielding enemies, forcing them toward cliffs or fire for environmental executions. Some cowardly enemies are most likely to surrender after witnessing the death of their comrades, some others are more likely to struggle and wail in their final moments. While the hardcore mechanisms and designs do add a lot of difficulty, the sense of accomplishment you get from overcoming it on your own is unparalleled. The map design is equally ingenious too. Not only are there plenty of collectibles placed in various corners, bringing endless surprises to players who love exploration, but most of the climbing and combat scenes can also be cleared with proper operations and clever strategies.

Weakness

Throughout the entire game of I Am Alive, there is an extremely depressing atmosphere and ubiquitous tension. In the downtown area, sandstorms will continue to deplete the player's stamina, high difficulty levels also require players to be more careful with their planning. A single mistake in climbing or combating may lead to total failure. Since the game's S/L mechanism is unique, except for the lowest difficulty, the number of retries for each chapter is limited. Once exhausted, you must start from the chapter's beginning. This makes the player's exploration and trial-and-error costs very high. S/L is often very frequent or even necessary for many players. Some chapters are quite long, which puts considerable pressure on the players. Also, as a game released in 2012, its compatibility today is quite poor. In addition to freezes and out-of-sync game audio and subtitles, the game is more likely to have errors when loading. When it occurs, the player will lose all progress except the starting point of the chapter, and the game might be forced to stop responding when exiting the game, which will have a significant impact on the gaming experience.

To create a gloomy and depressing gaming atmosphere, the developer intentionally added a gray filter and massive image noise to all scenes. Visibility is extremely low in the downtown area during sandstorms, at night, and in dark locations. The lighting effects are hazy and dazzling, with significantly high saturation. Although it highlights the authenticity of the game, it brings a very poor viewing experience to players. The combat system is also a point of criticism for many. Due to the unique design, limited resources, numerous enemies, and the fact that players are not invincible when judging melee attacks, the game's combat strategies and operations are very unique. Only by cleverly using sneak attacks and deterrence can you achieve victory, which takes some time to adapt to and learn. In the early stages, when ammunition is scarce and recyclable bows are unavailable, players may even need to exploit mechanisms and weak enemy AI to find shortcuts. In this survival game featuring realistic hardcore, this seems a bit out of place. The game has very few enemy types, and the rewards for delivering supplies to the intricately distributed victims are underwhelming. The effort rarely matches the rewards, and the overall playability is relatively limited. The extremely short process is the biggest problem of this work. Aside from the thought-provoking on the player's morality, the plot of the game lacks proper foreshadowing and development, the main characters are not well shaped, and the ending is extremely abrupt, with too much blank space. Even on the lowest difficulty, the relatively hardcore game design, ubiquitous sense of oppression, and tension are quite unfavorable to players who just want to easily experience the game's story and atmosphere.

Conclusion

From my personal perspective, I like this work very much, but compared to the concept trailer first presented to players at E3 in 2008, the original version of I Am Alive undoubtedly had more potential. If it can be more finely polished, it will definitely be a game that can make history. In comparison, the official release of I Am Alive is just a decent game, its limited gameplay and playthrough make it difficult to attract players to play it multiple times. Considering the twists and turns and the arduous development process that lasted nearly seven years, perhaps it is already a miracle that the game was released at all. Due to its highly experimental nature and niche audience, reviews of I Am Alive have been quite polarized too. If you enjoy hardcore, extremely challenging post-apocalyptic survival games with climbing features, and quite relish the immersive sense of oppression and tension throughout the game, then this is definitely one you should not miss-it certainly won‘t disappoint you.

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Therese a reason why this game got 66 metacritic.

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TLDR: Clunky combat, very short story with eye straining graphics. If you can get past that, the game does offer an interesting balance with its approach to combat and few resources to keep you progressing. The consumables and bullets are so rare that it makes every impulsive decision feel like it was the wrong one.

Story: You're trying to get back home, on foot. End of the world scenario is making the trip rather difficult what with the intense dust cloud and all. There isn't much to tell as you won't really have time to get attached to anyone as the game is short isn't very deep.

Gameplay: It isn't for everyone.
There are limited ''retries'', which is basically your option to continue from the latest checkpoint. If you're out of them, you have to start from the beginning of the chapter. Helping NPCs will grant you extra retries.
Consumables and bullets (especially ammo) are rare. So understanding which enemy is worth a bullet is a must.
When entering combat, the game heavily relies on you quickly prioritising which target you want to take out and how. Making one wrong decision can pretty much insta kill you and if you're quick to retry, you may end up using all of them and be stuck doing chapters all over again.
There are small but interesting mechanics, such as threatening enemies to back off when aiming at them, kicking enemies into pits and fires, retrieving your arrows from downed enemies. I know nowadays these are the norm, but at the time it was rather interesting.
As I mentioned before, the combat is extremely clunky. Swapping between weapons is slow, melee feels extremely off and I'm unsure how to feel about how sometimes enemies will rush you and sometimes they just don't (at the start of fights).
You have a stamina bar which depletes as your run, climb, shimmy, w/e. When attempting to climb something high, you'd best make sure you can make it.

Graphics: They were average then and are now only bearable. What really hurts it today is the filter that makes everything whitish. I get that it's for the story but many will find it unpleasant.

Audio: Acceptable. No great track or dialogue, it only gets the job done.

All in all, I'm just glad I played it as some areas got me thinking: ''I'm not gonna make it, I'm not gonna make it!'', and I suppose I'm kind of a sucker for that. However, one should consider that the game is old, and these ideas are the only redeeming thing about this game.

Game just sucks! It’s boring, it’s slow, it’s muddy. I tried it a few times and I keep dying as soon as you get out in the city. No idea how to survive.