It's hard to pin down exactly what Alone With You is. One could describe it as a visual novel, looking at your interactions with other characters and the text-driven narrative. So maybe it's also a text-based adventure, a choose your own adventure kind of game. On the other hand, you control the character and interact with your environment, so there are point and click elements as well. But there are very few puzzles aside from some simple passcodes you need to discover, and most of the puzzles that are there are spelled out for you in the game. Not that that's necessarily a complaint. Maybe it's a role playing game?
In my experience, Alone With You "A Sci-Fi Romance Adventure" is kind of all of those things, an interactive adventure story. The Sci-Fi was definitely there. I think I had forgotten about the romance part about twenty minutes into the game.
In brief, you play a faceless colonist clad in a fishbowl style helmet and jaunty scarf, skipping around the ruins of a failed terraforming mission to build a new colony for earth residents. You have three weeks in-game-planet time before the planet explodes to adequately prepare your escape vessel, led on your missions by an AI and assisted by four holograms of colonists who were leaders in their fields, those being communications, resource management, engineering, and food production.
By day, you explore a facility - let's say, the communications tower looking for tools and information on how to send rescue signals and get help. At night, you visit the colonist hologram responsible for that facility, so in this case, Winnie, the woman in charge of communications.
You make choices in your interactions that can be seen as positive or negative, you can go (albeit very slightly) out of your way on missions to discover artifacts and items personal to the corresponding hologram individual, and have a handful of times where you can choose which hologram you wish to interact with. I guess this is where the romance part comes in, but I didn't feel like I was dating these people - they weren't there for your love and attention, and everyone was working toward the goal of getting you off the planet, rather than begging for your affection. The intimate conversations you have shows these were real, flawed people, troubled by their pasts, looking for a reason to continue on in their current form, and just find some answers.
I played the game once through, and picked up a few extra trophies on the way. This took me about 9 hours. At points the cycle got tedious, but I found the narrative strong enough to keep me interested to the end. I will add, I know the creator's first game was a horror one, and that combined with the atmosphere and whatever else was going on in my head perhaps took away from the romance aspect that I mentioned, and kept me feeling on edge about some sharp twist in the story that I'll leave up to you to play and see if it ever comes or not. :)
The EGA-inspired graphics remind me of the old Sierra point and click games, and lent a unique touch to the game.
Ivor Stines' moody and atmospheric soundtrack was excellent. I recommend playing with a good pair of headphones on.
"Comms Relay"
"Colony B"
"The Rift"
Pacing was moslty good, at least of the story delivery elements. Gameplay wise, you may experience the tedium I mentioned about halfway through, but for whatever reasons, that didn't stick around long.
And the story was wonderful. Melancholic, at times unnerving, and at times heart wrenching to the point of tears, the text on the screen was the real star of this show.
Hopefully all this babbling inspires some of you to grab this title and give it a try. It was quite an experience and I definitely anticipate more playthroughs towards different endings in the future.
