I Am Alive

[uglybob1986]

I only found out about this game from a good review the other day, and it piqued my interest, so I decided to give the demo a try.


Set in a ruined city a year after an unknown apocalyptic event (Mitchell & Webb fans will be pleased to hear it referred to as "The Event"), our main character returns to his home to try to find his wife & child. Nothing original there, but there's some gameplay aspects which i found interesting:

This game requires alot of scaling the ruined structures of the city, but we are limited by a stamina bar that depletes its contents as the exertions are carried out. Failing to find a spot to rest before the bar empties, and the bar itself depletes, resulting in less stamina for future climbing, unless replenished by scarce items. This makes for a more disciplined approach to acrobatics than the Assassin's Creed or Tomb Raider games.

The developers have also made a good attempt to provide some new character interaction, which is judged based on the NPC's behaviour and situation. Some may be aggressive simply to protect their territory or property, in which case it may be best just to give them some distance. However some may be outright violent, in which case the player can attempt to fight hand to hand (depleting the stamina meter), or with a gun. Ammo is short though, so it may be worth trying to threaten foes armed with nothing but blades with your pistol. It's fun to see tough guys shit themselves when they see your gun which is, unknown to them, unloaded!

The atmosphere of the game seems unrelentingly grim, with people barely clinging on to life through sheer desperation. From what I've read it gets even bleaker after the demo ends, and I couldn't say where the story goes from there. It would be great to hear from someone on here who's actually played the full game, but I'm not sure I'll have any time for it since Mass Effect 3 arrives tomorrow! Seemed like a good and interesting game though.

Her's the review I read:http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/892356-i-am-alive-review-you-are-legend

[Dark Sky]

Is this the one which has a female character in it who looks exactly like Ellen Page, but isn't?

[Edit...it isn't.  That's The Last of Us.  There's quite a few urban post apocolyptic games coming out this year, they've all merged in my mind...]

[bitesize]

I have been kinda enjoying this game - took a while to get into it but once it clicked I was hooked. But what's killed it for me is the stupid save system. There's fairly frequent checkpoints, but it doesn't save the game there, they're only for restarting after dying. The actual savepoints are very few and far between, meaning you can only make any progress in the game if you've got a lot of time to dedicate to a session. I haven't. Couple that to limited amounts of restarts at the checkpoints (and if you run out of them, back to the savepoint you were at an hour ago!), and it can basically fuck off. Don't penalise me for only getting short amounts of time to play games, I can't fit the rest of my life around gaming like I could when I was a student/dolescrounger. At least put in an easy mode or something, that saves the game at every checkpoint, then at least I'd play all the way through your game. Sheesh.

If you have no restrictions on your gaming time, I'd recommend it though, it's probably really good...

[DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK]

I completely disagree about your checkpoints/saves/retries complaint. The reason the saves and stuff are relatively sparse is because the game itself is pretty easy once you get used to some of the quirks in the combat and climbing controls, it'd be an even bigger walk in the park if it catered to your complaint.

Overall I enjoyed the game, and think there were some great sequences and ideas here and there. Not sure why but I got a strong whiff of Max Payne throughout.

Can't decide whether I liked the ending or not though.

[chand]

Been playing this, I quite like it except for a few niggles. For one, if you're going to make me lose health easily and keep health top-ups sparse, please don't make the screen fucked up and vibrate my controller constantly while I spend 10 minutes struggling to find a tin of food. I appreciate that surviving alone in a destroyed city is hard going, but it's just annoying. Also, the combat is just bad. Everyone is trying to kill me, I have no bullets, and I need to take on numerous opponents at once using an imprecise stabbing mechanic while dudes are shooting me? Not cool.

Bits of it feel jarring too, I'm not sure why I'm often forced to kill people who haven't threatened me, as they beg for mercy.

[DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK]

You can save a lot of ammo by kicking enemies off edges/in fire after holding them up with the empty gun. The bow and shotgun are a big help if you track them down too.

[bitesize]

I completely disagree about your checkpoints/saves/retries complaint. The reason the saves and stuff are relatively sparse is because the game itself is pretty easy once you get used to some of the quirks in the combat and climbing controls, it'd be an even bigger walk in the park if it catered to your complaint.

  making the save points huge distances apart is an absolutely terrible way of increasing difficulty levels. if playtesting is exposing that your game is far too easy, there are roughly a thousand better ways of balancing it than making players replay huge great tracts of the game if they fuck up on a trial and error section. that's just bad design.

  also, the utter immersion-breaking incongruity of making me take out a bottle of water from my backpack and drink it to increase my stamina while i'm desperately holding onto a mile-high ledge with one hand is just stupid. so there.

[DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK]

making the save points huge distances apart is an absolutely terrible way of increasing difficulty levels. if playtesting is exposing that your game is far too easy, there are roughly a thousand better ways of balancing it than making players replay huge great tracts of the game if they fuck up on a trial and error section. that's just bad design.

Spacing save points out isn't a terrible way of balancing difficulty, and giving you more saves or an easy mode wouldn't make it an inherently better game either, it'd just be catering to your personal 'I don't have enough time for X game so I wish they would design the game around my lifestyle' crap.

I would personally like to see games being far more difficult and punishing by default, but I'm not going to penalise games like I Am Alive, Journey or the Metal Gear Solid games just because I breezed through them in no time. There are games I find impossible which others waltz through, and also vice-versa. The fact you don't have time to get from one save point to another in I Am Alive only says your lifestyle is incompatible with the way it's been designed, not that the game's difficulty balancing is inherently bad.

I don't have enough time to become a high-level competitive FPS player so they should give me an option in every FPS game to use a BFG with infinite ammo from the start of the match. Not catering to the fact I don't have time to practice is bad design. I don't have enough time to complete any new RPGs, so they should give me an option to just start the games with equipment and items that let me run through without wasting time grinding and let me be instantly competitive with the last bosses. Not giving me piss-easy access to the full narrative in this manner is bad design. I don't have enough time to read The Lord of the Rings so Tolkien should have written it with just one summarising sentence per page so that I could guarantee finishing it. Not writing it in this manner is bad design. I don't have enough time to watch The Sopranos so they should have just made the whole thing in to two 30-minute episodes that I could run through much faster. Not creating it in this fashion is bad design. I don't have enough time to go to Egypt to see the pyramids so they should have been built in Britain. Them not being readily-accessible within a few hours' drive is bad design.

also, the utter immersion-breaking incongruity of making me take out a bottle of water from my backpack and drink it to increase my stamina while i'm desperately holding onto a mile-high ledge with one hand is just stupid. so there.

Can't tell if this is serious or sarcy, so I'll presume the former just in case. Were you expecting a simulation of real-life or something? Why would that disrupt your immersion but not the fact that he's not even physically carrying all that extra gear in the first place?

Anyway, from what I can remember you're never made to go to your inventory to top-up your stamina mid-climb as I don't think there were any climbs in the game which couldn't be overcome with cautious planning for a high stamina level (and/or a piton). And actually I'll even argue that the ability to drink a bottle of water mid-climb is a feature put in for other whingers similar to you who don't have the time and/or skills for a version of the game without it.

[falafel]

Not being able to put a bookmark in LOTR until every hundredth page would be pretty fucking shitty design.

[falafel]

"Oh man, I have to read the bit with the fucking swamp AGAIN."

[DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK]

If you buy a book like LotR then you know full-well you'll physically be able to put a bookmark anywhere. If you buy a game, you don't buy it knowing you'll be able to save anywhere any time. You buy it in the knowledge that the team that produced that game sat down and made a load of decisions about how that game should be played. The buyer of that game may not like some of those decisions, but that has no bearing on whether or not those decisions are tantamount to good or bad design. I'm not saying there's no such thing as bad design (I'm the first to moan about some things), but bitesize not having the time to get to savepoints in Am I Alive is not inherently the same thing as bad design.

[bitesize]

I'm not saying there's no such thing as bad design (I'm the first to moan about some things), but bitesize not having the time to get to savepoints in Am I Alive is not inherently the same thing as bad design.

I never said it was. You said the distances between the save points was because the game would be too easy if it saved at every checkpoint. I said that's bad game design - there are much better ways of increasing difficulty in a game. Personally I think a system of limited retries combined with trial and error sudden death gameplay is a bad way of doing things, especially with the long distances between saves. Repeating long chunks of gameplay is never fun, it just makes me want to not play it any more...

[falafel]

Yup. That sort of decision in a game never made sense to me. What does it add? Challenge alone is no justification. A sense of dread? Of haste? Of endurance? Those things I can tolerate; those I count as contributions to the effect and power of a game.

Games are the only media that demand your attention in this way. It makes no sense to me: as far as I'm concerned you ought to be able to save anytime.Just freeze the game state and come right back to it.Why not? 

[falafel]

Oh and just because you know a decision has been made doesn't mean you have to accept it, surely? This isn't an empirical question - no absolutes - but rationing saves these days has always seemed a bit of a dick move.

[DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK]

I never said it was. You said the distances between the save points was because the game would be too easy if it saved at every checkpoint. I said that's bad game design - there are much better ways of increasing difficulty in a game.

That's exactly what I'm responding to. You said it's bad game design and that there are better alternatives, but you haven't said why it's bad game design other than because the game is penalising you for not having the time to play through it as it currently is. I disagree that it's bad game design regardless of whether you have time to play through the game or not.

Personally I think a system of limited retries combined with trial and error sudden death gameplay is a bad way of doing things, especially with the long distances between saves. Repeating long chunks of gameplay is never fun, it just makes me want to not play it any more...

That's fine, personally I'm more inclined to replay challenging games.

Yup. That sort of decision in a game never made sense to me. What does it add? Challenge alone is no justification. A sense of dread? Of haste? Of endurance? Those things I can tolerate; those I count as contributions to the effect and power of a game.

If the existing system does add a sense of haste or endurance, would that validate it for you? Because a sense of endurance was exactly what I got from being made to play through I Am Alive. And I don't agree that challenge alone can't be a justification.

Games are the only media that demand your attention in this way. It makes no sense to me: as far as I'm concerned you ought to be able to save anytime.Just freeze the game state and come right back to it.Why not?

That's exactly why I do like the fact that some games demand your attention like this - pretty much every artistic work within media like literature, cinema and so on has no capacity to be anything beyond a linear narrative on rails. I play games exactly because they can work so differently. I've never watched a film and had anything like a sense of satisfaction from overcoming a great challenge, but I've had that countless times from games. I generally identify with characters in games far more than other media, as I'm there personally interacting with them and spurring them on.

What it boils down to for me is my attitude towards interactivity. I always found those interactive films artists liked to experiment with years and years ago utterly tedious. I couldn't give a shit that I was able to choose between whether or not Andy stabbed his girlfriend or the milkman instead and see how events played out differently, because I almost always found the acting/writing/characters/story/etc. to be crappy, and I also had no personal investment in the 'existence' of any of those characters.

That's almost an identical attitude I have towards heavily cinematic-driven games - if I can save anywhere in a game, the game has to either be strongly profound for me in its own way or I have to get a challenge out of it through some other factors, otherwise I may as well be just selecting the next boring 'Andy now does this...' sequence.

And just because the medium enables the ability to save anywhere, that doesn't mean every individual game should. The medium also enables the ability to stockpile absurd amounts of weaponry and items, auto-aim, jump impossible distances and so on, but that doesn't mean every game should.

[DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK]

Oh and just because you know a decision has been made doesn't mean you have to accept it, surely?

Of course. Like I said, I'm not saying bad design and bad decisions don't exist, I'm just saying that a system of sparse saves/checkpoints/retries doesn't automatically qualify as "bad design". There was some design I would argue was bad, but it mostly revolved around making the game more challenging so I'm not sure it's worth bringing up in this discussion, heh.

This isn't an empirical question - no absolutes - but rationing saves these days has always seemed a bit of a dick move.

I prefer the fact that I Am Alive uses the system it does instead of letting you save anywhere. Why should you be allowed to save anywhere just because other games let you? Sometimes I can appreciate that saving anywhere could legitimately be the best system for a game, but I really don't like this sense of entitlement that because you can't save the game HERE and NOW that means the developers are being dicks to you or that it's automatically bad design.

[chand]

I don't think a game should force you to replay long stretches of shit you can do easily, to get back to a bit you can't do. It was what used to make GTA games frustrating when you had to drive right the way across the map to restart a mission when you failed it, it was just a pointless five minute timesink which added nothing to the experience.

Replaying bits and finally getting through by trial and error can be rewarding in the right context. I was playing Rayman Origins recently and the bonus treasure hunt levels were punishing runs against the clock which required an almost entirely flawless run through the level, nailing every single jump. It would take 15-20 tries to do the level, and it could be frustrating when you got near the end and failed, then on the replay failed the first jump. However, the levels were fast-paced, there's something to do every second, and your reward when you finally got through was a sense that you'd honed your skills to perfection, it's exhilarating when you finally utterly nail it. For more slow-paced games with lots of walking/climbing it's just needlessly infuriating, you end up redoing bits that hold no challenge for you, so the feeling is very much like I'm completing a chore rather than facing a challenge.

[bitesize]

OK, one more time - I did not say that me not having time to play it was bad design. My own time limitations are completely irrelevant, that's just why I personally gave it up. As I said, I think a system of limited retries, huge distances between checkpoints and trial + error sudden death gameplay is bad. It can leave the player having to repeat large amounts of gameplay - this is not a good way to increase the difficulty level of a game, it's just infuriating. If your game is too easy, make it better, not more frustrating.

Clearly you don't agree, so that's fine - glad you enjoyed the game. We will have to agree to disagree on this as I cannot be arsed discussing it any more.

[falafel]

I might buy it just to frustrate myself.