Alive In A Collapsed Society
by BONZO, HSM team writer
I Am Alive made its debut in the PSN Store, and if you are wondering if you should buy it or not, consider these points before you do.
I’ve heard of this game for some time, and seen a few clips of the game play and the polished promotional videos that always make a game look perfect. First thing that popped into my head was, “Not another post-apocalyptic survival game.”
It’s a popular genre these days; it seems that the inevitable collapse of society is the zeitgeist of the post 9/11 epoch, a little too reminiscent of the Cold War era. In our time it isn’t the Russians we are afraid of. though; it’s the threat of the economic collapse, the energy crisis, the food crisis, damages to our environment, pandemics, terrorist attacks, war, and power-hungry lunatics that threaten a nuclear apocalypse to advance their own selfish agendas.
However, most games that capitalize on our fears of the end of life as we know it seem to try to make you forget about it by throwing you into an unreal universe that reminds you constantly that it is fiction. Then they arm you to the teeth to make you feel like such a badass that you can restore order back into your world singlehandedly so you can be the hero again. Most of them also almost always seem to hero-worship humanity by pitting you against zombies, mutants, giant monstrosities, aliens, or dehumanized single-minded faceless terrorists that are hell-bent on a nuclear holocaust.
I Am Alive does none of this, and I would play it for that reason alone if it didn’t have so many other redeeming qualities. First of all, the story is one we immediately relate to: following a disaster, you are determined to return to your home and hope that maybe, just maybe, your love interest is still there waiting for you. We can all relate to the notion of being so concerned about our loved ones, be they romantic partners or family. The other is that your enemies are not mutants, or endless mindless rotting reanimated corpses who just want to take a nibble out of you or give you a big hug or something that will result in your inevitable assimilation to their kind.
No. In fact, your enemy is all around you: a collapsing, toxic dust-filled environment with hazards you have to work your way around. You constantly explore and problem solve through your own physical limitation, as you constantly struggle with fatigue and not having infinite strength or superhuman abilities. The worst of the threat is the real depths humanity can sink to once any frail and imagined system of order falls apart and we are left to fend completely for ourselves. It truly becomes survival of the fittest as you encounter other groups that look to rob you or fiercely protect their territories and mob mentality takes over.
(Editor’s note: at any given time, civilization is only nine meals away from anarchy. Remember this, and plan accordingly.)
This game does not arm you ridiculously to the teeth, either. You start out with a pistol but no bullets, and don’t count on many of them popping up. Most games of this ilk usually have a cache of ammunition lying around, or you can always steal an enemy’s reserves after you kill them. In this one you hope you find food, water or supplies if you can find them because those are the things that will keep you alive. The constant threat hanging over you is literally hanging over you in the heads up display (HUD). You do not have infinite stamina or strength, and your bar is split in half between white and red. If you push your character past the red point you are severely injuring yourself and your white bar gets smaller and smaller.
Your stamina regenerates if you don’t overexert yourself but the only way to refill the bar to the max is to eat, drink water or take some pills. You have to get around rubble and debris as you explore, and you have to run. All these things drain your stamina as they would in the real world. Too many games lack this limitation; in some you can practically run forever, and in games like Assassin’s Creed you can hang off a ledge indefinitely. Shadow of the Colossus had this limitation of minimizing your strength and stamina as you climbed and hung on for dear life, so it is nice to see this limitation again because it is a constant challenge.
Even though you climb steep heights and walk on narrow beams you don’t really have to worry about balancing yourself. You won’t move too far to the left or too far to the right and fall off a beam, but if you hang off an edge for too long you will get tired and you will fall off. Physics are a little more realistic as it doesn’t take the height of some twenty-story building to kill you; you can’t just roll as you land and be tip top, dust yourself off, and be on your merry way. You can injure yourself, and it will slow you down, and it takes a lot of time to recover. You fall from a couple of stories and you will die. 
It doesn’t take a lucky headshot to kill you either, and hiding behind a crate wont allow you enough time to heal after being shot a couple of hundred times. It doesn’t take much to die compared to other games, so that constant threat is always there. You truly are trying to survive, and Ubisoft did a brilliant job of getting that point across.
Ammunition is scarce, so the main defense is a melee weapon, but you can’t just approach some enemy and attack them. Sometimes there are multiple enemies you have to face, and facing them can be tricky; you really have to think on your feet about how to approach a situation. Sometimes you encounter some loner who wants no trouble and just wants to survive but has an itchy trigger finger. You approach these characters the wrong way, they will shoot you; you draw your gun at the wrong time, and they will shoot you.
A lot of enemies approach you with only a melee weapon, and you can get the advantage by surprising them if you draw your weapon and scare them a bit, but different scenarios call for different actions and you constantly have to strategize your approach to enemies and other survivors alike. One of the elements I have come to love in modern games is how often they include a karma system, and reward you or punish you for it. This one does the same, but in a more subtle way. Rescuing survivors will reward you with side quests and will open other paths that will help you collect more resources. 
The game emphasizes survival, and although most of the adversaries you face are essentially thugs, it really brings the point that in a collapsed society it will be the very worst in humanity that will be the toughest obstacle to survive. In many of the karma system games there was always an obvious answer between right and wrong. Fable, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout and The Sith Lords went so far as to physically alter you if you chose a negative path.
I often played these games through the good and the bad to see how much the experience of the game changed. I Am Alive confronts you with scenarios where you really have to wonder what to do? Do you only focus on your own survival or do you really risk your life to try to help someone else? Oftentimes in games, putting your own life at risk isn’t really a big deal; you die and it’s okay because you can just respawn at the last check point or the last save. No biggie.
I Am Alive, on the other hand, brought something back which I missed terribly ever since the inception of the memory card. Anyone remember “continues”? These used to be so coveted because you played along and got so far and if you played through all your “continues” you couldn’t go back to the last check point. You had to go back all the way to the beginning, and that was sometimes a very daunting task. Enough to discourage me from playing that game ever again, but it also challenged you to be a better gamer. I Am Alive has retries, which you can collect along the way or be rewarded with when saving survivors. You will want these because otherwise you have to return to the last save point which is usually the beginning of the level.
The virtues are good. It has a lot of good elements that it introduced. I enjoyed the problem solving and the challenge of encountering scenarios where the limitations of the character were really an obstacle. However, this game is not for the faint of heart. It is a very specific gamer that will enjoy this game. It isn’t enough action or free-play for a hardcore gamer, and it is too complicated and difficult for a casual gamer. So it falls somewhere in between.
Fans of the survival-horror genre may like it, as there are a lot of similarities with games like Silent Hill, sans the mutated atrocities that refuse to stay dead. Visually it is stunning: I love the emotional effect of the near monochromatic environment, but that can either be depressing, or creepy, or in the case of my friend Dom make you sleepy. The scope is beautiful but the graphics fell short; studios like Naughty Dog and Rockstar or other well developed games from Ubisoft like Assassin’s Creed have spoiled me by setting the bar so high on visual graphics that when a game like this comes along it makes me notice how sub par the graphics really are.
Will you like this game?
If you like a heavy-handed game that smacks you with some hardcore reality and forces you to really see yourself as a hero or just a survivor and throws some life threatening situations at you but won’t make you invincible….then you will.
If you don’t like challenges and slow-paced game play that throws some intense scenarios at you where you have to think fast on your feet and really use some problem-solving skills, then you won’t like this game.
Personally, I enjoyed the game for what it is. What that means is that it has been a fun experience, intense at times, frustrating often, but always successful at putting me in that survival mindset that tells me I need to keep my character alive even if it means running away or avoiding confrontation. That being said, it is not a game I will likely revisit again.
There wasn’t much in the game that made me want to come back. It was somewhat of a downer and a bit depressing. A lot of the scenarios were intense and I can allow for my personality to overthink a situation, but I like to feel good when I play a game. Not reach for the Xanax.
Games for me are about escapism; the media constantly bombards us with sensationalism about the worst-case scenario and about how we need to amass an arsenal and horde canned food and water. It’s too heavy a subject for me in a game. Now, you can be the optimist and make it your goal to rescue every survivor and be the silver lining on the cloud, but even beyond optimism I can’t see wanting to go through it again once you complete it. Not because of the difficulty, but the sheer atmosphere of the game. It is DARK, it’s gritty, and it’s intense. It is worth going through the experience once, but it takes a real glutton for punishment to want to replay it once you finish it through.
April 7th, 2012 by BONZO | 4 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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This sounds like an interesting game but not one I would be interested in. I am a casual gamer like you said and game to have fun. I don’t mind a challenge here and there to figure out, but too many and I won’t finish it, I play to have fun and play through a good storyline. Nice review Bonzo!
I’ve got to agree with your sentiment about wanting to feel good when playing a game, BONZO. This trend of grit and gloom that has not only permeated gaming, but entertainment as a whole is rather off-putting. Zombies are an automatic “no” for me as they’re more overdone than the pizza I burnt last night, and that goes for both games and TV/movies.
Very well done review!
Great Review Bonzo,
I downloaded the demo and played through all of it. I like Zombie shooters because sometimes I feel over empathetic shooting “real people” and hay, a zombie is already dead, right? I do agree that this genre has been way to over done as well.I did like the climbing part of the game, but over it was way to dark and maybe the title should have been I am Alive: but most likely not for long.