Once Alive is a walking sim by solo developer, Cem Boray Yıldırım, who has impressively approached this project with no prior game development experience or knowledge.
The game opens with a narration explaining that a rabies-like virus has wiped out most of humanity. The few survivors who are immune to the virus are further threatened by animals who are also infected. Our main character, Jim, and his brother, Daniel, believe they are the last people alive after not seeing any other living humans for sixteen years. After Jim and Daniel argue about risking venturing out into the world in search of other survivors, Daniel angrily leaves, and we’re now searching for him. We follow his lead to a mysterious, walled settlement which has somehow not only survived the pandemic but thrived in a new way of life. Now, there’s rarely a story such as this where there isn’t something shady going on behind the closed doors of this idyllic haven.
We’ll explore the settlement, read notes and watch scenes played out by ghosts to reveal the story behind this place, much like other games in this genre such as Everyone’s Gone to Rapture and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. While Once Alive’s premise and story are interesting, a lot of the mechanical and design elements let it down. It’s a huge feat to develop a game as one-person team, but a lot of these elements could have been avoided even with a low budget.
While I went into Once Alive expecting very little gameplay considering it’s a walking sim, there are a few gameplay mechanics which are strangely introduced at the start and then never revisited again. One was a physics-based ‘use a plank to cross a gap’ section where, instead of being given a button prompt to lay the plank down, we’re able to free-handedly place it wherever by ourselves which I’ve actually never seen before… and never saw again in this game as this was the one and only time it was used. The same goes for a chase segment where we had to run to cover from infected crows, I thought this would be a massive problem during exploration, except they again never showed up again. Finally, there was a one-off quick-time-event which felt really random. It’s almost like the developer wanted to include these throughout the game but changed their mind and for some reason chose not to remove them from the start of the game. I actually would have liked for these to have been included throughout but maybe there just wasn’t the time to make it work.
That’s mostly it in terms of gameplay, which I was expecting from a narrative experience. But unfortunately, the narrative is also really let down by the voice acting and dialogue script. It’s unclear whether the voice acting is solely to blame for this as the problem is across the board. A lot of the dialogue lines seem to be really rigid and the majority of the dialogue doesn’t sound like a casual conversation between human beings. But the voice acting from the main character in particular is very overdone. While I wouldn’t expect a game with this team size to have a large budget for voice acting, I think for a narrative experience it’s really important that at least the main character’s voice is somewhat easy to listen to considering they are present for most of it and we’ll be hearing their voice a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of his lines are overacted where a more subtle line delivery would have been fine. It doesn’t help that this character feels the need to interject at every opportunity and it’s never left to the player to come to their own conclusions; he must explain what’s happened, how to feel, and even when entering certain rooms which are visually impressive he’ll say “woah”.
Visually, Once Alive’s environments are absolutely gorgeous with realistic lighting and textures thanks to the Unreal Engine 5. I also noticed that the interior design of the houses was really beautifully put together; each one looks unique and truly lived in, well-representing the person that lives there. Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with textures loading late, even when I lowered the graphics settings to the lowest they could be, but this can hopefully be patched at a later date. What can’t be patched is the really awful animations for facial expressions and walking. While the walking isn’t so bad, the facial expressions are really jarring as everyone looks like a malfunctioning android. The worst part of this is that the cut scenes including people’s facial expressions didn’t need to be included in the game. The introduction scene where Jim and Daniel argue could have just been audio playing as we explored, or Jim just referring back to the argument he had with Daniel. We didn’t actually need to see it. I think when you’re working with limited tools on a game it’s really important to know what the limits are to these tools and how it can be worked around in a clever way to disguise the restrictions.
While it’s impressive that Once Alive is not only developed by a solo developer, but a solo developer with no prior game design knowledge or experience, it unfortunately has some quirks which take away from the overall experience. It’s built on an interesting premise and there’s some great ideas, but just doesn’t hit the nail on the head in terms of execution.
Jess played Once Alive on PC with a review code.
