Am I Alive?

I Am Alive - PS3 Game Review



I have no idea where I first heard about I Am Alive. I think it might have been E3 2009, or 2010. It was a game whose prospect intrigued me - you are a man in Chicago after a massive earthquake has ruined most of the city, and turned the majority of the people who survived feral. You have to then survive in this, and I think I first read that so long ago that there wasn't even an end purpose for this. Either way, I was still looking forward to it. Many years and developers passed since then, and they produced a game with an un-named protagonist who attempts to navigate the city he lived in after an un-named "Event" that destroyed life as he knew it, and left a cloud of toxic dust over everything that was below 20 feet above the ground. He has to find his wife and daughter in this mess. Alright, fair enough. But could a game four years, two developers and a distribution medium down the line still fulfill the promise that it seemed to appear with all those years ago?

Well, I Am Alive is by no means a perfect game. There are many areas where you would expect a game that's been in development for 4 years to do a lot better. But there are many things that it does right. The story, while a bit vague and told through a spectacularly moribund main character, does what you want it to - it makes you care. You do genuinely feel fear when going through different places, either trying to survive encounters with very violent people who always pull machetes or guns on you or trying to survive climbing up buildings. It draws you in, with the knowledge that your survival and progress is directly controlled by what you do. very few games ever manage to do this sucessfully and it's a testament to how good I Am Alive is that despite its flaws and relatively small scale it can still immerse you so well.

So, on those flaws... it's kind of hard to ignore the biggest one, which is presented with no hyperbole or exaggeration for effect: I Am Alive is the ugliest game I've ever played. The graphics are bad on a level which is indescribable through words, it makes the much-maligned standard cars in Gran Turismo 5 look like they're from a console released in 2200. They range from bad because they're basic (the cars around the city, and the exteriors of buildings) to bad because they're just ugly, which is just about everything else. People look utterly horrific, with the hair in particular reminding me of playing my old PS1 discs on the PS3. Something went badly wrong somewhere. Thankfully you only ever notice these things when you're in buildings, as the Event led to "The Dust" being absolutely everywhere, this dust serving to obscure everything. It covers everything with a layer of obscuring stuff that's the same colour as static on old tellys. You'd think that it makes a handy escape for the general shoddiness of the graphics but even this looks too... bad. Still, it only really obscures your progress when travelling to locations, which is kinda the point.

One thing that I Am Alive is built on is resources. You have a health bar and a stamina bar, the latter being depleted by exerting yourself physically. Or, by walking through the dust. Which I found off, since surely you could cover your mouth to at least delay the effects. But, no. You do find a gas mask during the game which slows the pace down, but I can't help but think I would have done a better job in the dust at times. In terms of resources to find, there are varying types of food, liquids and medicine. You do also get the option of giving resources to people who need them in exchange for information, and (from my first playthrough at least) you can do this as much as you like, because it's easy enough to stay alive enought o play through the game without needing to constantly heal yourself. Admittedly I was playing it on the easier difficulty where resources are more common, but it was still a bit less perlious than it could have been. Weapons was where this differed though.

Bullets are a precious commodity, and given the reactions of people you find, this is a bit of a bastard. Everyone who isn't a victim you can help is someone who'll try and kill you. There are no options for interacting with hostile people aside from killing them or holding a gun at them, which is really annoying. You have to be quick at this point too, because you generally face groups of three or more people and if more than one has a gun, you need to be really quick to stay alive. The lack of an interaction option is something that really distracts you at this point, as you don't want to fight. Killing people doesn't really serve a purpose aside from getting you past people, and in a game that "explores the darkest parts of humanity," the apparent need to kill seems really misplaced, which is a shame.

One area that really lets the game down is the actual gameplay itself. The third person camera can get really annoying, though it at least has the decency to switch to first person when you're aiming a weapon. Camera control is pretty tricky when you're climbing, which is really annoying as the movement when you climb is so vague that it has to be experienced to be believed. And given that your stamina decreases as you climb, the lack of complete control when you're climbing (or the percieved feeling of it at least) really hampers your ability get into the game. I still found it noticeable even at the end, when I was almost used to it. This and the graphics don't necessarily make the game unenjoyable, but they do remind you that the game seems to be the bastard child that nobody wants, and still manages to feel rushed in parts despite its development history.

I Am Alive is by no means a bad game. Given everything it's went through, it's better than I expected. Despite its failings - bad graphics, short length, price, odd ending and gameplay issues - it does still manage to keep you gripped, and make you care. There are moments where the game is truly horrifying, and the exploration into human nature is done in a manner which is truly chilling. While I feel as if the amount of time I've waited for this game and how much hope I've had that it would be good is clouding my judgement slightly, I do still feel as if there are many things which I Am Alive has managed to do well, which should make it worthy of your attention. Maybe wait until it's in a sale first though, if you're not desperate.

More Than Just a Journey

Journey - PS3 Game Review



Journey is a download-only game released on the PSN on the 14th of March, selling at £9.99. It was developed by thatgamecompany, who produced the acclaimed games flOw and Flower (grammar optional for this mob, clearly). I have both flOw and Flower, and I don't think much of them. flOw's a lot of... nothing really, though Flower is an improvement, but still lacks something to make it even worth recommending. Journey however is a step that's about a hundred places ahead of everything that's came before it and not just from thatgamecompany, but from all of gaming.

So, why is it so good? What has led to it having a 92/100 rating on Metacritic, with unanimous praise from everyone who's played it and reviewed it? Considering pretty much every review I've seen of Journey ended with something like "it's really good, but you kinda have to play it yourself to understand it and appreciate it," I was intrigued. What could be so good about a game costing a tenner that takes at most three hours to complete, with minimal action and no dialogue? Well, I hate to be like one of those reviewers I mentioned earlier, but it's kind of hard to describe...

I'll give it a go though. You are an un-named person in a red robe in a desert. There is a mountain in the distance. The object is to go towards this mountain. It's not just a plain desert however, there are the ruins of a civilisation you have to traverse, and at the end of each section, you get a history lesson on what you've just went through. The action you go through isn't particularly taxing, you can collect tokens that allow you to jump, and as you collect more you can jump for longer distances. Fairly simple. And it doesn't change the whole way through, so it's not a difficult game to play.

Looks-wise, Journey is nothing short of simple. Borrowing from the Mirror's Edge school of thought in that "less = more," the environments are all very bold and simple, with striking scenery throughout. There are times when it's just surreal, going from a desert to a section that still is the desert but is coloured to look like it's underwater (and which does so very convincingly) is a testament to the design team, being able to keep a consistent design all the way through but being able to manipulate it to look like something which is the complete opposite. It's the same when you get to the top of the mountain and the sand becomes snow. And the simplicity of the pictures through which the story is told is a nice compliment to this, balancing the grandeur of the world you're in. And speaking of the story...

I don't want to describe the story. Or how it is told, because I'm trying to think of how not to ruin it for you reading this. But a story which is so simple and laced with such bold and dramatic imagery/allusions doesn't suffer from the lack of dialogue. The genius here is that it benefits it tremendously. The visual clues combined with the score (which is superb, and was one of the highlights of Flower) tell a story in a way which is much more effective than conventional methods of story-telling. You could write novels with hundreds of thousands of words in them and they wouldn't compare to the way Journey combines sound and vision to put the message across. And that's what makes it so special.

Very rarely have I played a game that made me feel, and since I finished it (I've made it to the end twice) I've been wracking my brain to try and remember feeling the way I did about a video game ever before, and I've come up short. Probably because I've never played anything in the style of Journey, actually. Heavy Rain had me shouting at the telly and disconsolate for days, the story in Mirror's Edge still ranks up there for me as does BioShock (and probably BioShock 2, though I don't think I've touched that since I finished it). But can I say any of these games made me feel the way Journey did? I don't think I can. I know I said I hated all the reviews who said you need to play it to understand but that's the only thing that I can think of saying that would be enough to make you understand how I felt when I finished. Although it has to be said, that finishing the game the second time round was much more emotional for me, and for good reason (the next paragraph may feel a tad shoe-horned, but I forgot about it as I was going through).

Journey can be played on your own and I finished my first playthrough like this, but the game connects you with other players when it can. It's up to you whether or not you interact with them and at the second time, I did. I stuck with the same player for about half the game and if I'd thought this game was a touching experience on my own, there's something else when you're playing it with someone else. You don't have any way of contacting the person while playing (though you do see the names of the people you played with after the credits have finished), and this lack of communication certainly adds to the feeling of tension and emotional investment. Thankfully I was paired with someone who seemed to have a degree of sense about him, and this helped. But I was still desperate to get through the game with him, and it's a testament to how much Journey draws you in that you can find yourself so attached to someone who may as well not be a real person. Again, I'm loathe to say it, but it's something you can't really get unless you do it yourself.

At face value, Journey is a game which isn't appealling. £10 for something which took me no more than two and a half hours on my first go and which is sketchy in terms of replay value sounds like an awfully bad deal. But you can't think of Journey as a game. It could be called many things, a game, a story, an experience, art and indeed it is all of these things in some way, but the only way to fully judge it is to give it a go. Whatever you take from it, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.