Developed/Published by: Darkworks, Ubisoft Shanghai / Ubisoft
Released: April 3rd, 2012
Completed: 23rd November 2015
Completion: Finished it.
Trophies / Achievements: 90%

I really didn’t intend to play another post-apocalyptic game after Fallout 2 (that, uh, wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas.) In fact, I was just digging through my PS3 downloads looking for something to play that wasn’t House of the Dead 4 because I’m still putting that off, and I realised that I’d downloaded this donkeys years ago, probably when it was sold for pennies in a sale, and I thought “meh, might as well play this through.”

I was actually expecting a Raw Danger-a-like, because I had the misapprehension that it was actually about a natural disaster, but it’s not, it’s actually about some unknown thingy happening, and our hero has spent a year walking across America trying to get to his wife and daughter. The game catches up with him just as he reaches his home town.

Now, I Am Alive had a not-very-famously difficult development, being worked on for about six to eight years before finally being shoved out by Ubisoft as a cheapy download title, when it was clearly supposed to be a much bigger release. Playing it, you absolutely, completely, totally get the sense that they just stitched together what they had, went “this will have to do” and shoved it out. I mean, not to spoil anything, but this is a game that starts with a hero looking for his wife and daughter, but he then spends the entire game helping out a couple of other characters. Then it ends.

And the design is a bit… can I use an emoticon here? The design is :/

It’s a game that starts with your hero talking about how he’s got a gun with no bullets, and how he’s never killed anyone—and let’s not forget, he’s walked across the entire continental United States by this point—and pretty much the first hostile people you meet in the game our hero casually slits the throat of the first to approach and kicks the others into a fire. And if you do shoot anyone, you can (for no particular reason) encourage your hero to emotionlessly stab them to death as they roll about weeping and saying “I don’t want to die here.” I guess this town is uniquely violent.

(It’s a bit of a shame really. Almost every encounter in the game follows the exact same script—stab a guy, shoot the toughest one(s) and bludgeon the others to death—and this completely flubs the initial exciting idea, that you have a gun you have to use to fake your way through high tension situations. It reminds me of one of Tim Rogers’ game ideas, an FPS where you have one gun and one bullet, and you won’t fire it until the very end of the game. I always imagine it’s called “Chekhov’s Gun” but I bet Tim thinks that’s a bit too on the nose.)

Also. I recently got a pull-up bar, because I’m tryna get hella swole. And let me tell you: pulling your own bodyweight up sucks. It sucks so hard. And this is supposed to be a fairly grim, ‘realistic’ game, but so much of this game is insane, Nathan Drake-would-be-like-“WTF” climbing. You know that bit in, I think, Uncharted 2 where our hero is hanging off a train that is in turn hanging off a cliff and he’s shitting it, and it’s completely unbelievable because he’s all beat up, but it’s also a thrilling pulpy adventure so you don’t really care?

(The all time best example of this is probably the whole “bus sliding off a cliff and having to climb down and around to get off it” thing Paul Walker does in Furious 7.)

Anyway, the hero in I Am Alive does this non-stop. He literally chooses to cross a chasm by leaping across and through a train car that’s hanging off a cliff, and he does it with a small child strapped to his back. It’s super dumb and my weak baby arms hate it.

The game attempts to realisticify this by giving our hero a stamina meter, which runs out in an annoying way so you keep having to stop and wait for a bit. It works really well in making the game seem dumb as hell though, because of what I consider to be the most amazing clanging why-would-you-design-this design: massive swathes of the game are played in a dust storm where you can’t regenerate stamina. So, as a result, your hero spends most of his time climbing up the sides of buildings and stuff to catch a breather.

It’s so stupid! Not only does it make trying to navigate the game’s world madly frustrating, it’s also insane to imagine that you’d be like “I’ll just climb this drainpipe” when you want to breathe a bit. Would I just be less committed to my survival than this guy? I dunno, maybe I’d die in a couple of hours, but it’s all so nob.

And that’s the game, really. Navigating a confusing dusty world with no visibility in a staccato fashion, and regularly meeting hostile dudes who you murder in a pretty gnarly fashion. But setting wise, I was disquieted.

You see, I Am Alive is one of those things where they’re like “we’ll really make a point about how people would react after a disaster.” Which means, pretty much, “horrible future where women are chattel.”

I could blether about this at length, but it’s a game where you keep rescuing abused women. It’s very grim: the woman handcuffed to a table who explains she was kept as a “pet.” The woman, uh, handcuffed to a bench used to lure other people to their death. The entire section of the game that takes place in the “Blue Hotel” where you see a woman with a broken ankle, other women forced to dance for armed men, and a young girl tied to a bed. The hotel, specifically explained in the game as a prison for women to be abused in.

It’s… unpleasant, and apparently a fixation of the design team. And it doesn’t really… go anywhere? I get that men are super super awful. But I hardly think running about throwing first aid kits or shooting handcuffs off is a very satisfying way to deal with the issue of uneven power dynamics in survival situations. It’s an aimless use of trauma to juice up a world and make it more “realistic” and I think it’s… honestly I think it’s icky and unnecessary. Maybe don’t use abused women as a way to get my dander up for all the cool murders you want me to do if that’s literally the limit of it.

So, you know, I Am Alive, on top of being a kind of a moger of a game, bothered me on a level I feel I can’t satisfyingly conclude. Indeed, this article is about a good example of how incomplete my feminist understanding is, so I hope you can forgive me. But anyway, just… don’t play this.

Will I ever play it again? Nope.

Final Thought: I’ll have to play through one of the Zettai Zetsumei Toshi games now to wash the taste of this out of my mouth. But of course I won’t get around to that for like a year, meaning I’ll be swishing this nonsense around in my mouth for a while.