I Am Alive
I Am Alive was first revealed to the world back at E3 2008. One magazine’s cover story that December hailed Ubisoft’s great new console hope a “groundbreaking survival epic”, with much excited discussion about its supposed reinvention of first-person gaming, of how – in the words of senior producer at the time, Alexis Godard – “developing gameplay based around the concept of social chaos is, I believe, something really new”. Now, some four years later, I Am Alive is finally here – its’ title having taken on the mantle of a wry commentary on the game’s very existence, as well as being an overt nod to one of the key post-apocalypse works, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.
Whatever the reasons for such a significant delay, the 2012 model of I Am Alive bears little resemblance to the game initially previewed. Gone is the first-person perspective, while any attempt at depicting “social chaos” has been jettisoned, leaving an eerie absence of much that could be described as, well, social. What remains is a third-person adventure notable for its emphasis on deliberation, isolation and dust. Lots of dust. The fictional American city of Haventon lies mostly deserted a year after a disaster, referred to throughout simply as the Event, wiped out much of the planet’s population. Your task is to clamber across the city to find your wife and daughter, who were evacuated as the Event struck (and yep, the Event merits its capital ‘E’).
Although I Am Alive is a third-person adventure whose core gameplay revolves around athletically climbing across the environment, the approach here is a fair distance from the likes of Assassin’s Creed 2. The key distinction comes in the form of a stamina bar, which governs your movement to the extent that even running depletes it; this in itself is fine, because the standard walking pace works perfectly with the game’s almost permanent atmosphere of instability.
Basic climbing slowly reduces stamina whilst more demanding actions, such as jumping from one ledge to another, burn even more energy. Because only resting can naturally replenish stamina, traversing the more complicated networks of pipes, slopes and ladders becomes an exercise in forward planning. It’s a subtle grounding in realism that also doesn’t detract from the fluid movement gamers used to the Uncharted series will expect. The big difference is that whereas ‘everyman’ Nathan makes the big leaps without any effort, I Am Alive forces you to recalibrate your understanding of third-person platforming and the distances that characters can successfully traverse. Jumps in I Am Alive are often prefaced by a wincing button press, which is a bigger achievement than it probably sounds.
However, of all the surface similarities to more famous franchises, the game I Am Alive most clearly resembles is Alan Wake, Remedy’s pulpy 2010 psychological thriller. It’s there in the developers’ tight control over the player, the effective pacing and the tension between narrative and gameplay. Of the latter, I Am Alive is arguably more successful on one level. Whereas Alan Wake’s struggle was internal – and more effective for being so – I Am Alive uses the central narrative device of a camcorder carried by the protagonist to reinforce the eerie feeling that you’re both playing through and observing, at a distance, a story that has already unfolded.
Viewing scenes from the camcorder before returning to play out, in real-time, the moments that follow may undermine player agency, but in I Am Alive the effect is to justify the game’s linearity. The motivation becomes not the search for the protagonist’s missing family, but your desire as a player to find out how the story ends; the aforementioned design tension then, between narrative and gameplay, comes from simultaneously feeling every physical exertion of the protagonist, whilst realising that very few games feel so fatalistic and, if you think about it, this sad.
I Am Alive’s combat system meanwhile adheres to the same realistic emphasis as that seen with the stamina bar, albeit with less success. As there’s such a lack of resources – having two bullets in your gun is considered generous in this world – actions need to be measured and decisive. Faced with one or two desperate ‘enemies’ – gasp at how savage humans can be when society collapses! – you can often get them to surrender, even bluffing threats by pointing an empty gun as if you’re ready to shoot. With larger packs, targets need to be picked carefully, given the scarcity of ammo. The problem is that, unlike with something as definite as scaling a wall, interaction with fellow survivors should feel a little unpredictable and, well, human. Instead, encounters with these aggressors lack flexibility and settle into a mechanical predictability. That’s not to say that such moments aren’t nervy affairs, and it is at least pleasing that developers Ubisoft Shanghai didn’t undermine the deliberate atmosphere elsewhere by heading in the direction of all-out action.
It’s hard to gauge how well I Am Alive would have turned out had it been pushed into the blockbuster mainstream that Ubisoft presumably anticipated all those years ago, given that many of its notable successes have been dictated by the creative freedom afforded to smaller downloadable titles (Naughty Dog’s forthcoming The Last Of Us may well be the answer to this hypothetical issue of what could have been, but that’s another story). It’s distinctly lo-fi in terms of visuals and environmental detail, and far from being either groundbreaking or epic, but the bold manner with which the aesthetic and set of mechanics support an overall theme of survival and hopelessness ensures I Am Alive is an experience worth undertaking. Though there isn’t enough distance from our time with the game to say for sure, I suspect that its atmosphere will linger long after many other, more instantly gratifying games, have faded from memory.
This review is based on the Xbox 360 version of I Am Alive, supplied by Ubisoft.
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