
Once Alive Review
Developed by Cem Boray Yıldırım and published by the Turkey-based GameDev.ist, Once Alive is a story-driven first-person adventure game about a man looking for his missing brother in a post-apocalyptic world. Being a big fan of story-driven games, I was very interested when I found out about this game.
The experience takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which only a very small number of the human population survived because of a virus. This sickness affects animals too, but instead of killing them, it makes the animals go crazy and start attacking humans. Believing they are the only surviving humans, the two brothers, Jim and Daniel, suddenly learn about a human village, Haustville, located a few days’ journey away, with a chance of their father being in it. The older brother, Jim, believed they shouldn’t risk the trip and was angry at their father for things he did in the past. Meanwhile, Daniel was willing to risk everything for the slim chance of having an actual community and maybe even seeing his father again. Since Jim couldn’t be convinced, Daniel decided to sneak out and go towards the village, and when his older brother found out, he was ready to go find Daniel. The story begins moments before Jim finds the village Daniel was supposed to be in, except it seems to be completely abandoned, and our main character has to find out what happened and where his brother went. Both the premise and the actual story are very interesting and engaging, and I found myself thinking about possible explanations for some of the mysteries going on in this town whilst playing.
It’s a pretty cinematic experience overall, though there isn’t much to do except enjoy the story. There are some ‘puzzles’, but they’re not particularly well-designed. Most are the usual (and annoying) experiences of “there’s a key somewhere, I won’t tell you where it is, just find it”, which only serve to make the game less fun. There was one puzzle I actually enjoyed in the later parts of the game, but it was really, really easy, unfortunately. Other than that, it’s mostly just a walking simulator, and occasionally you can interact with objects. Sometimes it’s really hard to pick up small objects, since your reticle needs to be exactly on the object you want to interact with, making it what I like to call “an Aimlabs moment”. So yes, overall, the gameplay is not enjoyable at all.
According to the developer, Cem, the faces and animations in Once Alive are based on real scans and motion captures of him and his brother, and honestly, that doesn’t surprise me. The game looks absolutely amazing, in both its movements and the different scenes in it. Some of the views in this experience could easily make it into someone’s wallpaper and I wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s from a videogame and not an art piece. Unlike the usual cases, this awesome look doesn’t come at a big performance cost at all, as you could get 60 FPS on 1080p using a simple GTX 1660. Any modern card could run this easily, and something from mid-tier and up could do 1440p and 4K too.
There is full voice acting for every piece of dialogue in the game, and honestly, it’s a hit-or-miss depending on the character. Jim’s voice is great, but other characters can sound very awkward and lifeless. Since Once Alive was made in Turkey by a Turk, I thought to try it with Turkish voices, but the game does not have separate sound and subtitle settings, meaning I could not understand a single word until I turned it back to English since I don’t speak Turkish. The music isn’t anything too impressive but fits the atmosphere of different scenes and does sound good overall.
To sum up, Once Alive isn’t the best experience unless the story and graphics are all you care about, and even then, it’s a very short experience — I managed to finish it with all achievements in an hour and 40 minutes — and I spent around 10-20 minutes trying to find a stupid key. I don’t know if I could justify paying £9.99 for what is, essentially, a pretty short interactive movie.
Once Alive (Reviewed on Windows)
Minor enjoyable interactions, but on the whole is underwhelming.
An interesting story and amazing visuals ruined by annoying gameplay and a sub-two hours playtime.
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