I Am Alive

Taking the break in my gaming schedule before Prototype 2 arrives to catch up on the downloadable titles I was planning on getting.

The story is it's been a year since the "event", and the world is fucked. Like, The Road kind of fucked. You arrive back in your home town and have to find your family. Don't know much else at the moment.

Encounters with other people have varying outcomes. Some need help, some want to kill you, some just want you to go away. Resources are fairly scarce (I'm playing on normal, there's a survivor mode with less resources). The game takes a classic "fuck you" approach to gathering bullets, in that the enemies can shoot you as many times as needed to kill you, but then when you retry and kill them, you only pick up 1 bullet. You can draw your gun when it's empty to intimidate people, but if you wait too long to do anything they catch on and attack you anyway. If they surrender you can knock them out, or you can order them over to a hole or something and knock them in.

You have a stamina meter which drains when you do anything more strenuous than walking. If it runs out while climbing you have a perform a... something, I forgot the name. But basically you tap R1 a lot while a circle closes in on the screen. Doing this reduces your stamina capacity (so you have less stamina when the bar refills), and if the circle gets too small you fall.

Overall, first impressions are this should have stayed a retail title, although it's still a good game. It does look as though it was all finished but had to be hastily downgraded at the last moment. But it's done tastefully enough. Fog, smoke, glare, grain, blur and bloom obscure and hide everything in the middle distance and beyond. The colour palette is practically monochrome. Music is almost constant but usually very simple and underplayed. It all works very well to create a cool atmosphere. But tell-tale signs like NPCs repeating the same 3 lines of dialogue and some rather basic animations do detract from the game a bit.

This game is harsh. I guess it's possible to roam around and find every item necessary, but a lot of the time when I find someone who needs help and I just don't have what they need.

I was walking along a raised railway, and I heard this woman calling out. I looked around for a while and eventually spotted her on a rooftop. Took me a while to find a way up, but when I approached she was sat on a bench. Then 4 guys jumped and tried to attack me. I had to use my only bullet in the encounter, and when it was over it turned out the woman was handcuffed to the bench. She said the gus forced her to call out for people, and asked me to shoot the chain on the handcuffs to set her free. But I couldn't. So I just had to leave her there, in a worse situation than she was before. I felt kind of bad.

Although again, if she hadn't been repeating the same 3 lines over and over it would have been better.

Is it true that you have to kill all opponents in some way?

Well, some surrender and you just knock them out. But basically, yes. So far there hasn't been any options to avoid a confrontation (no stealth sections yet) and no one ever runs away. Although this only applies to the people who pick a fight with you.

Sometimes you'll meet someone who will just threaten you and tell you to keep away, and you can choose to do that or fight them to see if they've got anything worthwhile. I saw some dude who had a few supplies, and he only had a knife as far as I could tell. I could have killed him and taken his stuff but I didn't. I wasn't sure if he was alone and even if he was, I'm not a jerk. People with guns are best left alone unless you have some bullets yourself. You can bluff people with an empty pistol, but I've yet to meet an NPC who did that. They always have ammo.

But if someone comes up and starts a fight, they're going to die.

Seems like this reeks of poor design decisions.

Not sure why you'd say that.

Seems like this reeks of poor design decisions.

Your face reeks of poor design decisions.

This game is pretty good.

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

Not sure why you'd say that.

The whole mashing R1 thing. Button mashing like that is something I don't really like in terms of game design.

Oh that. Yeah, not a fan either. I thought you meant bad as in actual technical problems.

Well that's both annoying and depressing. While going through the subway I found woman who needed some food (she refused to eat the (not so) "mystery meat"). I gave her a couple cans and went on way. Later on in the game I was making my way back through the same part of the subway and decided to see if she was alright. She'd hung herself. What a fucking waste of two cans of food.

There have been a couple parts where it was possible to sneek around enemies and avoid confrontation now.

"Abrupt" doesn't come close to describing that ending. I felt like there was going to be a couple more levels but then it just ended. What turned out to be the final section was really short too. Up to that point it was a good game though.