Caveat: there are some obvious problems with I Am Alive, ranging from its gameplay elements and visuals to its seemingly rushed release. Therefore, I don’t expect my appreciation for it to be mirrored - or even understood - by most. My thoughts are simply the reflections of someone who values the concepts that the game does well above the ones it doesn’t.

For a title that had quite a bit of pre-release hype and sold fairly well on its debut, I Am Alive seems to have been relegated to the dark pits of memory. It had a long, troubled development cycle: originally conceived and worked on by Darkworks, it was adopted by Ubisoft Shanghai after the French developer closed shop, with the new caretakers basically keeping the original concept and the ‘Alive' in the title while scrapping most everything else. I had never come across this game until I randomly found it on a sale, and looking it up, I also didn’t find that many Youtube videos on it, especially from more recent years. Long form retrospectives, something increasingly popular with video games as the years go by, seem all but non-existent for this title. For all its solid commercial performance, I Am Alive didn’t even seem to be reviewed particularly well, with PC and Xbox sitting at a 66 and 69 on Metacritic respectively. I’m not entirely sure why this realistic post-apocalyptic survival title has become so forgotten over the years, but I do know that I absolutely loved some of the concepts it introduced.

I have to start by talking about the thing that impressed me the most in I Am Alive, its encounters. Let’s assume you bump into someone along your journey. They can largely fall into three types: 1) those who need help, 2) suspicious, scared or friendly survivors, and 3) hostiles. The first group is very straightforward - you can choose to help them then, later or never, and thus receive a couple benefits from it (including info that fleshes out the mysterious event at the heart of the apocalypse) or get nothing. Encounters with the second group can go a number of different ways: you can rob them, you can kill them, you can persuade them to calm down, or you can move on. Whatever you decide to do needs to be weighed against a dual backdrop of resource scarcity and moral quandary. The third group however is where things get truly interesting, because this is where the intimidation mechanic shines. Melee combat is often a necessity - and not very enjoyable due to its repetitiveness and lack of skill required -, but the gunplay scenarios make I Am Alive stand out among the games I've played. There are several ways to interact with enemies in these moments: you can try to escape, you can intimidate (if you do so without bullets, this essentially turns into a high-stakes, time-limited poker game), you can open fire on the leader to fully subdue the rest, you can kick them over edges or into fires, and so on.

This system isn’t perfect by any means: it often feels undercooked/unpolished, and precise aiming takes a bit to master. But it feels original and refreshing even today. As unrefined as it sometimes was in the game, this mechanic is a perfect fit for a post-apocalyptic world of this nature, where everyone is distrustful of everyone else, and the horrors of the event open the door for the horrors simmering inside the human mind. I wish more games incorporated this in a meaningful and effective way.

Another very interesting thing that I Am Alone does is the combination between its platforming and stamina systems. I did not expect a game of this nature to have so many platforming segments, but they actually form the bulk of the gameplay. The stamina premise is really good - you basically need to make your way through a devastated city, full of crumbled buildings you need to climb and traverse, often having to reach the higher ground in order to avoid the effects of the dust storms that ravage the surface. But the catch is that, at every climb and traversal segment, your stamina is being continuously drained. Keep going for too long, and it’ll affect your health. Keep going for even longer, and you'll die. There are ways to counteract this drain of course, but you have a limited number of checkpoint retries before reverting back to your last save (not checkpoint). This really ramps up the tension throughout your playthrough especially in Survivor mode, with its more restrictive retry system and harsher resource management. Platforming as a whole feels like its own thing and quite enjoyable to go through - especially after you acquire the grappling hook -, even though, like most other aspects in the game, it would have greatly benefitted from some more attention and time, since some janky segments (namely time-sensitive ones) can get on your nerves.

The third aspect I also highly valued in I Am Alive was how they were capable of capturing such effective, gut-punching post-apocalyptic atmosphere. There’s a grainy, gritty, almost noir art style to this game - in the vein of Spec Ops: The Line or the first The Evil Within - that takes some getting used to, yet it also paints a quasi-perfect picture of its world. The whole vibe in I Am Alive is an exercise in immersion, evocative of the worst aspects of a safety-deprived humanity that the game continuously places front and centre. From the opening music to the brutally dry delivery of the ending, there’s an ominous tone to this game that becomes hard to shake off for a while after you’re done with it. Even if, once again, here too there’s a notorious lack of refinement or final touch, which you can mostly see in the poor texture work that assaults your eyes more often than it should. The aggressive lack of visual clarity - explained by the world and its lore - is another unfortunate problem with the game at times.

One final note for the story. The game surprised me in how it progressed its narrative in a direction I didn’t really anticipate, but it still offers a compelling, often emotional ride. At times it almost feels like I Am Alive tried to be The Last of Us before The Last of Us, and even though it reached nowhere near the same heights, I still feel it deserved more recognition over what it attempted to do. The ending was delivered in an overly direct, abrupt tone, almost hostile to the player in how it seems to ignore their emotional involvement with the journey. Keeping true to most of its other aspects, here too one could argue that it ends too abruptly, like it ran out of budget or time before needing to get something out. However, this is the one area I would disagree: just because it didn’t give me the trip I expected, I still liked the trip I got; and just because it ended abruptly, it doesn’t mean it ended poorly. In fact I thought it was very in line with its world, a place where you don’t exist to be the centre of it, you simply exist. Your goal in I Am Alive isn’t to become a larger-than-life figure, even within the confines of its story: it’s to survive. Through those lenses, I appreciated how it subverted my expectations and how the storytelling conducted itself.

Again, my appreciation for this game is simply a measure of my personal enjoyment of it. It is in no way meant as an objective measure of its quality. I Am Alive has several obvious flaws, and I don’t think many - if any - would actually rate it as highly as I do. But there is a rare entanglement of concepts within this game that really resonates with me, and I Am Alive handles them well enough to make it stand out amidst my gaming journeys. Thus, to me, the tragedy of this game isn’t that it wasn’t good or didn’t live up to the hype. It’s that, with a little more care, love and attention, this could have become a defining moment in the realistic post-apocalyptic landscape. I do hope someone revives it at some point. 8/10

Game: I Am Alive

Score: 6.0

• Combat: 3 out of 5
• Controls: 3 out of 5
• Difficulty: 2 out of 5
• Exploration: 3 out of 5
• Platforming: 5 out of 5
• Presentation: 3 out of 5
• Story: 2 out of 5

Pros

• Stamina-based mechanic adds needed tension to sometimes boring parts of gameplay: platforming and traversing the environment.
• Combat encourages more creative solutions through its minimalistic nature.
• "Secrets" and optional sidequests are a bit of challenge to discover, but not too difficult to the point of being frustrating.

Cons

• Combat can be quite frustrating, especially early on in the game and/or if you ever run low on bullets.
• Uninteresting story.
• Black and white palate doesn't add value to the game.
• "Secrets" sometimes aren't worth the price of admission.
• The stamina-depletion theme begins early on during stamina loss; in other words, you'll be hearing it a lot.
• On the Xbox One, the control button for firing and running is the same (RT). During tense encounters, muscle memory could get in the way.
• Some platforming movements are less than precise, which can make for small but reoccurring bouts of frustration.
• The optional sidequests are generic and repetitive.

Overview
I didn't know what to expect from I Am Alive going in, as all I had known leading up to my playthrough was that it was a survival-based title. In fact, I knew so little about the game that I actually thought it was part of the survival-horror genre; oops. Back when I was a youngin' and actually thought review scores were relevant, the mixed reviews the game received gave me enough pause to avoid playing it to this day. However, I was pleasantly surprised with my shallow, though nonetheless enjoyable, experience. While the game's weaknesses are readily apparent and it doesn't offer much in the way of depth, the core gameplay was enough for me to enjoy the game, particularly during some worthwhile stretches.

Pros (Full List)

• Because you would rarely know ahead of time where your ultimate destination would be during platforming sections, the act of traversing can become a tense experience. This is compounded by the fact that some platforming sections offer multiple paths to pursue, although only some of them would get you to your destination (you can usually rotate the camera to get a better idea of the correct path(s) to take, however). There are also some sections of the game where merely walking around will slowly drain your stamina, making you desperately search for an escape to higher ground through the thick dust. Sadly, after the first few opening chapters of the game, things become easier from a platforming standpoint, with only a few specific sections causing a significant amount of stress and/or forcing item usage. Regardless, platforming is an enjoyable experience, and by far the highlight of the game.
• While combat can be a frustrating experience at times, it improves considerably near the midpoint of the game with the addition of a "rechargeable" bow: you start off with only one arrow, but are able to pick it up again after firing it. This adds some much-needed variety to combat in situations where you would be facing multiple enemies, but with a slight caveat; if you would want to use your bow multiple times during a single encounter, you will need to lure specific enemies far enough away from their allies to guarantee you would be able to pick up the released round and get another shot off before being attacked. Although some might consider this more hassle than fun, trying to find that balance between bow-usage and gun-play during group encounters was enjoyable for me.

Cons (Full List)

• The biggest issue when it comes to combat is its general lack of flexibility as a result of enemy numbers, particularly during the first few chapters. With one foe facing you, you would have the option of pointing your gun at them and forcing them to submit or outright shooting them. However, with 2 or more foes the former option would fall off the table, thus forcing you to the latter. Obtaining a bow significantly helps in this regard, but would still require some ingenuity.
• Nothing about the story is all that interesting or engaging, though the voice acting is solid. This includes the optional sidequests, which would only offer very minimal insight into the time before "The Event".
• When attempting to switch onto a vertical piece, your character may sometimes miss the mark and go further sideways instead of latching onto it. This can be somewhat avoided by a slight pause after each attempt, but it does slow down the pacing a bit.
• The optional sidequests always follow this format: find person/people who need help, find item(s), bring item(s) to them, get rewarded with a replay and a tiny bit of uninspiring dialog. The only rewarding part of the process is finding these folks to begin with.

Other Notes

• Graphics are rather bland.
• No music for the most part.
• You are given a specific number of replays during each chapter, and less on harder difficulties. Once all replays have been exhausted in a given chapter, you would start from the beginning of the chapter rather than the most recent checkpoint.
• The one open-world section in the game offers the ability to test one's resolve if tackled earlier on than necessary (ie, the first time you would enter the area). Also, aside from this one area, there isn't too much exploring one can do.