Alone with You
I found Alone with You
in my library with no memory of what it was or why I'd bought it.
It's a small
Having said that...I
can't recommend this game, unfortunately. I wish I could. See,
the game introduces itself with this very interesting concept. You're
the last survivor on a terraforming colony planet. With the help of
the colony AI you need to rebuild the escape ship so you can get
close enough to a trade route to send a signal for rescue. But
neither you nor the AI have the expertise to solve all the issues
required. So your AI uses back up holograms of four dead crew members
to help you. As you search through ruins of settlement buildings for
parts, you also find remnants of these people's lives, and you bring
them back, discovering more about who they were and helping them find
closure about their last months alive.
What an awesome premise! Sadly, the execution doesn't really do it enough justice. You only get a few fairly-short conversations with each crew member, so you don't really get to build a very strong relationship with any of them. The dialogue options are limited to basically “Agree, disagree, maybe”. And your only motive is to keep them happy enough to work on the ship, so, there's no conflict, really.
You spend most of your time digging through the aforementioned ruins. And this is probably the biggest let down of the game. I know, what could be boring about digging through ruins? But sadly, the gameplay consists of walking around and pressing the “interact” button on all the things. There is some light puzzle solving, but it's basically “find the password”, and sadly most of it doesn't actually make sense. For example, one 4 digit password is comprised of the number “24” taken from a calendar, and the number “12” taken from a med-kit, but there is no logical reason why anybody would combine those numbers and use them for a password. They're just, the only 4 numbers you can find anywhere. The one puzzle I found that actually did require some work actually made me give up on the game altogether.
What an awesome premise! Sadly, the execution doesn't really do it enough justice. You only get a few fairly-short conversations with each crew member, so you don't really get to build a very strong relationship with any of them. The dialogue options are limited to basically “Agree, disagree, maybe”. And your only motive is to keep them happy enough to work on the ship, so, there's no conflict, really.
You spend most of your time digging through the aforementioned ruins. And this is probably the biggest let down of the game. I know, what could be boring about digging through ruins? But sadly, the gameplay consists of walking around and pressing the “interact” button on all the things. There is some light puzzle solving, but it's basically “find the password”, and sadly most of it doesn't actually make sense. For example, one 4 digit password is comprised of the number “24” taken from a calendar, and the number “12” taken from a med-kit, but there is no logical reason why anybody would combine those numbers and use them for a password. They're just, the only 4 numbers you can find anywhere. The one puzzle I found that actually did require some work actually made me give up on the game altogether.
Why? I guess, by that
point I was pretty tired, I wanted to play through just to get to the
end, but this puzzle required like, “go get a notepad” level of
keeping track of names and numbers, and I just didn't feel like it
had earned it. Later, guiltily, I reopened the game to give it
another shot, but the last save was about an hour before the puzzle,
so I quit again.
So in short, cool pixel
art, very cool premise and themes, poor character relationship
building, poor gameplay, poor puzzles. I give it 2/5. It might still
be worth checking out on sale, if those good points sound like enough
to sell it for you.
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