I Am Alive...

I Am Alive is a pretty bleak action/adventure game from Ubisoft and it manages to evoke a post-apocalyptic world full of danger and survival right from the get-go. It’s a suitably grim tale of one man’s search for his wife and child, against all odds and the ever-present dog-eat-dog world that he now inhabits. If the environment doesn’t get you, the roaming gangs of survivors will.

Fortunately our hero (called: Adam) isn’t completely without hope or the tools to survive, he has a gun (with no bullets), a flashlight, camcorder, backpack and a climbing rope/hook. He can pick up other weapons, like a machete and a longbow along his adventure and the trick is to really get into the headspace of a survivor, think like a survivor and pick your battles.

So without further ado, here’s the skinny on the game.

There’s a lot of survival in I Am Alive, you’ll be constantly struggling against the very world that Adam lives in. There’s a complete traversal mechanic for climbing around the various sections that require an Uncharted-style clamber-fest. Adam doesn’t have infinite stamina though and the moment you’re hanging by those fingertips, that bar starts running down...and once that bar’s down, you need to press a button rapidly to perform extra or extreme effort moves.

This depletes your maximum stamina too, which means less stamina to rely on for later stages of the climb. Or in general, until you can eat some food/drink some drink and top it back up. Managing your supplies of restorative items is a mini-game in of itself, with careful consideration required when having to negotiate the treacherous world one year on from the Event.

There are quite a few supplies to get in the gameworld, though not all of them have an immediate use for Adam. They can be given to various NPCs that he encounters in order to earn more retry tokens, and complete Side-Quests in the game. A medipack might be able to heal you to full health, but it could also save the life of a poor kid who got on the wrong side of someone’s knife in a back alley.

These decisions are the ones that you have to live with as well, what do you do? Do you become a Samaritan and save the people who live in your world, or do you walk on by like so many others and leave them to their fate?