Alone

When Alone begins, you’re driving down a barren stretch of road. Then you run out of gas, forcing you to leave the safety of your car to look for fuel or help. However, with the worldwide Infection running strong, finding another living soul just might mean your death.

As I write this, Alone has ten ratings in thirteen days on the IFDB. Not only is that double the number of ratings of any other game in IFComp so far this year, in the four years I’ve been involved with IFComp I’ve never seen so many ratings for a game in such a short time. Clearly, Alone is resonating with a lot of players. It’s easy to see why: We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and while COVID-19 isn’t ravaging the world as deeply as the Infection, the setting of Alone speaks to an anxiety many of us currently have.

But setting alone wouldn’t be enough to keep so many players engaged, and, indeed, Alone is also plotted well. When you first run out of gas you’re not too worried because you have more gas in the trunk. But the gas can turns out to be empty. For me, this was when I first experienced an anxious feeling in my gut. As I explored the deserted gas station up ahead and its immediate environs, that feeling grew. It continued growing throughout the game as the stakes slowly grew higher and higher, reaching a peak with the foreshadowed and entirely appropriate climax. I’ve completed it and yet I still feel somewhat tense: Alone has affected me emotionally more than any other game I’ve played thus far in this year’s IFComp.

The writing is sparse, with often quite terse room descriptions. This makes some game worlds feel empty, but that’s exactly the kind of feeling you need for a game like Alone. Some of the puzzles are rather easy, but several are quite good, requiring you to use an object or part of the game environment more than once or in an unexpected way. I got stuck on a few puzzles, and even the temporary frustration of not being able to overcome an obstacle contributed to the game’s overall effect.

While Alone‘s implementation is good, I do think it could be improved here and there. There were several reasonable things I tried that didn’t give appropriate responses, a container that I couldn’t put things into, some singular responses to plural nouns, and a few misspelled words. The writing could also be tighter in places. But none of this detracted much from my overall experience of the game.

In sum, Alone is another strong entry in the post-apocalyptic game genre – and one that seems to fit our moment particularly well.

(Disclaimer: We played the first part of Alone at the Seattle IF meetup earlier this week, with the author, Paul Michael Winters, reading the game aloud. We only got through a couple of the early puzzles, though. I finished the rest of the game on my own two days later.)