Review: Alone

Name: Alone

Price: £0.79 / $1

Available on : PC (Steam store)

Reviewed on: Laptop 1

Review:

Alone can best be described as a 2D pixel art survival game. You play a girl who is the only survivor of a crashed plane. You objective survive and try to get rescued. What follows on is a resource management game with some puzzle elements and quite a bit of praying to Nuffle the God of RNG.

It's very clear to me the game was made with some passion but does shows some issues of it clearly being an amateur creation. As an example of a nice touch they do have a very clear epilepsy warning at the start of the game rather than one buried among a myriad of other notices etc.

It's worth noting that warning does also apply to videos of the game in this review just in case.

The thing I can point to about the game seeming a bit amateur is the severe lack of information given to the player about well everything. As an example the gathering screen says it will gather resources from nature which early on I thought was likely the way to get resources starting out..... Nope, all gathering does is get you the odd few of the main resources very rarely and tends to get you lots of miscellaneous (which confusingly are actually also classes as berries). The main resources you need and will be having the manage the most of food and fuel. The best way to get food is hunting, which you can't really do early on; the best way to get wood to use as fuel for the fire is actually to leave your camp and explore in a 2D side scrolling section.

Now before I go on to talk more if you want the "JOY OF DISCOVERY" and learning to play this game yourself  beyond the basic info I just gave you then skip ahead to the image that says "You have Frozen to Death"  I won't spoil the puzzle elements at all because they're a main part of the game really but I feel I should give people wanting to play a leg up on the mechanical info I've figured out.

Right so here's what the game doesn't tell you. There's multiple items to find and each of them is very much required to survive or at least give a sufficiently good chance to survive.

The Axe = gives you more wood for what you manage to collect, at a guess the idea is you can cut stuff up smaller making it go further. This is a huge advantage when you get it and you'll want to upgrade it to level 4 pretty quickly.

The Fishing Rod = Allows you to sit and try to fish for food, personally I only used it a few times but if you find this before other item or you don't find the others at all (Nuffle is cruel sometimes) then it may see you through.

Traps (No not that kind) = likely the earliest hunting item you'll get other than possibly the fishing rod, they'll mostly allow you to catch smaller things and importantly they let you get leather which you'll need for a lot of upgrades.

Bow and Arrow = Your early game hunting item, you want this, you want to upgrade it and you'll use it almost exclusively. This lets you go full Lara Croft and kill deer, which tend to give more food and often more leather. There's also a rare chance to kill a bear which gives a lot of food.

The Rifle = a Later game item that allows you a higher chance of managing to catch something and a far higher chance to kill a bear when hunting.

The Scope = make it so you almost always get a kill while hunting with the rifle

Matches = Replaces the fire lighting mini game with a fair easier one.

The Kettle = allows you to cook better meals so food fills you up more

Whiskey = gives a temporary full body temperature that doesn't drop for a set amount ot time and then can plummet after

Medicine = cure fever and restores some health

Compass = lets you select where to go instead of it being random all the time but you can only go back to places you've visited already so you will have to try random to find some of the other locations.

Camp upgrades = this increases your storage capacity with the final upgrade letting your store 35 wood

Warm clothes = This decreases body temperature drop

If you max all the camp upgrades and all the warm clothes then sleeping at camp slightly raises your body temperature.

Ok so how does the stat balancing play out? Well You have to balance your hunger, body temperature and health and to a lesser extent your camp fire level. Eating restores hunger and some health. Sleeping (without upgrades) increases health but makes your character more hungry and reduces body temperature. Adding fuel to the fire boosts body temperature but makes you slightly more hungry (this works even if the fire is fully fuelled). You have to decide and manage resources as going hunting will likely cost you some health (more so without warm clothes) and make you hungry, reduce your camp fire level and drop your body temperature but you get food for it. Leaving your camp lets you gather wood easily and sometimes a few berries but you also supper a small bit of health, some body temperature and some hunger (no matter how long or how much time you spend out), there also the chance of having to sacrifice food and getting injured in various ways which I'll leave for you to find out.

So now I've talked about the gameplay elements I should probably talk about things more generally. In general the game does feel like there's quite a bit of RNG relating to the appearance of items you need to complete the game. Beyond about day 25-30 the game introduces the fact you can get trapped out in an avalanche which costs a lot of wood and food to dig back into your camp from outside and can screw you over quite a bit. The idea of avalanches isn't a bad one but as time goes on the RNG system can decide it just hates you and give you multiple avalanches in a row meaning your death is almost certain as you run out of resources and don't have enough to recover your body temperature and health and hunger enough to get quite as much as you need keep surviving.  The game also keeps a few mechanics entirely obscured such as the fact there is a creature in the game that you can bribe to not attack you or in blizzard condition other creatures have less of a chance to attack you.

The game also has a huge disconnect between the items you gather and seemingly the side scrolling exploration bit as once I've got weapons I can hunt squirrel and other animals by going hunting but running into a squirrel in the side scrolling bit I can't pull out the gun and shoot it. Also you can't use the rifle or bow to defend yourself in the open world against some of the things that will hurt you.

One extra thing of note is that sometimes you'll get trapped outside of your camp by doing things that you wouldn't expect would require you to leave it. I mean eating food, ok maybe you'd go outside but sleeping? You can get trapped outside of your camp by sleeping at camp. That's just weird.

If it sounds like I'm being quite negative here it's because, well I really like this game, I really do and I actually wanted to get the bad points down before I start to gush about why this game is just so damn good.

For all the hiding and obscuring its own mechanics this game feels very much like the game all these artsy indie walking simulators all aspire to be and Alone manages to also pull in gameplay and somehow make it all look effortless.

Alone really does manage to through simple pixel art, some sound effects from online and some (hopefully) paid for music, make you feel isolated while playing. The howls of wolves punctuating the lower level noise of the wind. The cries of a bird in the middle of a sombre song.

The music selected for this game seems just perfect, sometimes sombre and mournful making you feel alone, other times seemingly reflecting the supposed spectacle of nature and yet other times feeling driving. It can be almost oppressively like a ticking clock and the snow beats down and your resources feel like they're slowly running out as is you feel your chance of returning to civilisation in the game slowly slips away.

Now the sound effects and music largely weren't made by the developer but selected. However the pixel art was and it's done with an amazing attention to detail (well except for the wolves who glide rather than walk). The wind blow the your characters pony tail around and the game even changes the colour of your characters skin to reflect their temperature with them going blue as hyperthermia starts to set in.

 This gives an amazing warning to the player of things without needing the UI to show up. When you're dangerous close to death the screen shakes and moves as though your character is shivering to death. The multiple environments are made out to be pretty distinctive and fairly easy to tell apart and the sweeping landscape vista shots in the game look pretty amazing.

Verdict:

The game took me about 4 hours before I felt like I'd figured out most of the mechanics and by the 5 hour mark I'd got to very near end game. It took me until I'd got 8 hours on the clock until I finally beat the game for the first time on normal and the game still has more hidden stuff for truly dedicated players to find so for the asking price it does provide quite a return.

The game also feels like even though it's basic pixel art it still feels quite high quality well done pixel art and coupled with the sound effects and music used it creates a compelling engaging experience for at least 5 hours or so.

The downside being it does feel like it obscures a lot of its mechanics and you can just be screwed over by RNG at times with little you can do to stop it but to me it managed to keep me playing for 8 hours and mostly be able to overlook those flaws for a while.

Its score however must reflect the issues and other things I've mentioned that can detract from the experience by frustrating a player.

This game is the first game I believe deserves to be the first recommended game in the new hall of fame even though it fails to become the first game to get a perfect score.

Component score

Overall score:

See I got through all the review without making the joke about how playing Alone sounds like a euphemism for masturbating