Alone With You (2017)

Your enjoyment of Alone With You will depend greatly on your expectations. If you're taking it as a traditional adventure game, then you'll be left wanting more. You'll spend more of your time walking than solving anything, and the few puzzles that are available present very little challenge. If you're looking for a melancholy sci-fi tale, Alone With You delivers on that expectation quite well. The illusion of choice is broken rather quickly, but the characters and their dialogue more than make up for it, and the intriguing tale comes to some satisfying conclusions. Alone With You is recommended for that latter group, but anyone who's looking for an adventure game that's a bit out of the ordinary should also check it out.

Touching, emotional, dramatic. Alone With You is an interactive drama that's engaging and supported by a script that touches very deep issues. Recommended for lovers of the genre.

All definitions of ‘game’ aside, Alone With You is an impressive affair that I recommend to anyone who has an affinity for science fiction narratives and/or interactive storytelling. Its tale is both haunting and human, incisively reflective and extremely well told.

Alone With You is a truly unique animal, the strength of its writing and characters is a testament to the artistic merit within the growing ‘interactive novel’ scene. Instead of simply using science fiction as a backdrop for laser guns, space battles and alien babes, Alone With You engages its audience as adults. It examines what it is to be human through the genres of science fiction and romance, genres often man-handled or abused by the medium. It kept me guessing, with it avoiding the clichéd plot twists and contrivances that I expected.

Don’t get fooled by the cheesy description “Sci-Fi Romance”. This is an intelligent adventure novel. Unfortunately the puzzles can’t live up to the storytelling.

Quotation forthcoming.

The degree to which you like Alone with You will depend largely upon how much emphasis you put on story versus gameplay. At times, the game feels a little bit too much like a walking simulator with 1993 graphics. A game like Alone with You that features survival so heavily as one of its major themes should make survival tough and satisfying, but the game does not offer that experience. On the other hand, success comes in abundance with the game’s setting, characters, and story. Whereas most “space disaster” games feature scary aliens, action, and explosions, Alone with You features realistic human tragedy. It is a unique approach to this genre of fiction that I have never experienced in video games. It is for this reason that this game can still be considered an overall success, despite its overly simplistic and deeply flawed gameplay.

While I did often find myself frustrated by it, ultimately I enjoyed my time with Alone With You. But as to whether I see myself playing again, unearthing the secrets and getting to know its cast of characters from another angle – there, I’m not so sure. But for fans of the adventure genre – and particularly visual novels – it’s well worth at least one playthrough.

Alone With You joins the ranks of others who have used the sci-fi lens to successfully scrutinise the human condition, but does stumble in some of its endeavours. The decision to include actual, puzzle-based gameplay rather than presenting the narrative as pure visual novel was, I think, a good one, but the pacing falls victim to its own intended sense of routine. Ultimately, I found the story of the colony’s fate took precedence over any romantic entanglement hologram pals, but that 5-6 hour tale is a compelling essay on the anxieties of extreme isolation.

What the developer was trying to do here feels on the cusp of something grand. If different design decisions were made or the dialogue was fleshed out more – if the presentation was more powerful and aligned with the setting – then this could have easily been a positive commentary. Unfortunately, that's not what we got. The tragedy of the colony and its talented inhabitants could have been a story worth telling, but like the colonists that remain on the desolate planet, it's better left undiscovered.

Alone With You is overall a narrative driven game that is severely hampered by its shallow repetitive gameplay, and while the narrative has plenty of depth, the mind-numbing tasks in between story moments become tiresome quickly.