I Am Alive review: Better off dead

Adam starts with three retries, which bounce him back to a checkpoint. No more retries, and Adam must restart from the save section. Having trouble completing a save section? Restart the episode. Where episodes, save sections and checkpoints in I Am Alive begin and end is unclear. And having to think so much about all three is another strike against the game's emphasis on real world decision-making. A tough choice is sapped of drama the third time it's made.

Then there are guns, and they are useful, actually, when not being fired. In conflict, Adam raises his weapon. Sometimes enemies surrender. Most of the time they gingerly raise their hands in half defeat. On a few occasions, they'll charge Adam, knowing he likely lacks any ammo. It's a welcome addition to video games, where people hurry into gun fights the way sane people hurry onto a bus.

Unfortunately, the system never amounts to more than a handful of repeated showdowns. 75% of the time, three men approach Adam. The first man is killed with a surprise throat-slit maneuver. The second shot. The third, left to plea for his life, is stabbed via a lengthy quick-time event. Mix-up the order, and Adam's injured, killed, or out of ammo. In short, prepare to slit lots of throats.

Uncovering the atrocities of the off-whitest town on Earth is unsettling, not just because looking at human bondage and sex slavery upsets decent human beings, but because the game forces the player to become an actively unlikable participant. And worse, it makes you hate the people who most need help.

A survivor asked me for rat meat. I only had fine wine and fruit cocktail. I demand rat meat, said the survivor. So, being practical, not wanting to start a fight, I walked away, hearing him wretch in agony. Why must I forsake him of the rat meat he deserves? Later, I returned to the survivor, and would you believe he hung himself over rat meat. I had wine, you fool! And fruit cocktail!

There's ham-fisted dramatic irony. After climbing and failing and climbing and falling up and down a skyscraper, I reached an upper floor with two men and a woman discussing baseball. They came at me, and I shot them in the face with a bow and arrow. The next floor, I met two kids (and bumped against their tomatoes, unintentionally adding what was probably their only food to my inventory). "That's a big bow," said the boy. "What do you hunt with it?" That line was subtle. The next line, delivered by the girl was not. "Have you seen our parents? They're one floor down from there?"

Yes, I saw them, and they got arrowed and I am so sorry and I really wish I hadn't taken those tomatoes, because you look awfully hungry, but I just can't get them out of my inventory. But I do have wine and fruit cocktail.