LOW Staggering around for half an hour with a sliver of life with an irritating "heartbeat" rumble and an ugly red-screen effect ruining the look.
The core of I Am Alive, the part of the game I admire, wonderfully depicts the challenge faced by its nameless protagonist trying to cross a shattered metropolis. As he climbs through dust-choked buildings broken by some undescribed event, each movement drains his strength.
STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS
1) Rule-based
-I Am Alive is ruled by a stamina bar which determines how much
strength the main character has before collapsing. If his stamina
depletes before finding a place to rest, it's possible to perform a
last-ditch push. If safety hasn't been found after that, the next thing
to come is a wetly abrupt halt at the end of a long fall. Unlike most
games where climbing plays a large role, it's extremely important to
survey the territory ahead and plan a route before taking any action.
With certain paths leading nowhere and some maneuvers requiring more
strength than others, rushing forward and expecting the game to
compensate for poor decisions is a quick way to end the adventure.
2) Feedback driven
-I Am Alive is bold, challenging, and refreshing in its approach,
but I would guess the difficulty might put some people off. Although I
hesitate to call it a hard game, the constant resource management and
extreme levels of caution and awareness required to play successfully
are not the norm. There are also some rough areas that could have used
work, such as obstacles or surfaces that seem able to be scaled, yet
can't be. Some instances also occur when the developers are clearly
pushing the player towards a conflict, signaled by things like open
doors becoming locked (and vice versa) in order to funnel the player a
certain way. It's a little too overt at times and can intrude on
immersion, but I forgave it in light of what it gets right.
3) Goal-oriented
- order to travel where he needs to go, the character will often scale
the sides of dead skyscrapers, find pathways across broken concrete,
hang from dangling pipes and claw into impossible fingerholds. While
extreme climbing is hardly new, how it's done here is.
4) Problems
- The time given is too short.
5) Interaction
- Types of interaction in this game is the "single-player"
6) Representation
-Representation in this game is concrete because the game is played live