Alone With You’s cataclysm builds a foundation in traditional science fiction. A hyphenated corporation controls an interplanetary terraforming operation, and a geological disaster wreaked havoc on the sparse residents of a faraway planet. The colonists’ demise was both immediate and prolonged, but now, an indeterminate amount of time later, you’re the last survivor with a slim chance of making it out alive.
Introspection is a deceptively natural response to solving Alone With You’s crisis. In theory, the management team hired by an interplanetary terraforming company should be competent enough to perform their duties under the stress of any number of contingencies. But they didn’t. They couldn’t. A series of poor decisions lead to the death of dozens of people. Why four capable human beings couldn’t salvage their colony is Alone With You’s mystery. What you’re going to do about it is the larger problem. The scientific expertise necessary to execute an escape plan is, unfortunately, locked away in the minds of the deceased.
Your AI buddy has a solution; using data culled from its own observations, it is able to recreate four key colony personnel inside of its VR/”holo-sim” realm. Once a day, you’re allowed to enter a holodeck (of sorts) and virtually chat them up about their lives, their faults, and whatever’s necessary to get you back home. In Alone With You, this arrives in the form of the player asking basic questions and the holograms replaying with a verbose assembly of thoughts and emotions. Writing may be the game’s strongest asset, as each character acutely conveys different senses of loss and regret alongside a willingness to try and help you out. You need them and, in a way, they need you, too.
Speaking with facsimiles of people raises interesting existential questions. Alone With You embraces these moments with its characters. Each one is a snapshot of that particular person right before the rift accident that ravaged the colony. Your new friends are aware of this, and, in most cases, ask for information that lead to collapse of their “other” self. It’s essentially a parallel existence of humanity, with the additional caveat that they can never really leave their virtual habitat.
Because of its scope—at the end of the day Alone With You is still a $10 title with a modest budget—it avoids diving too deeply into perilous circumstances. Speculative fiction could conjure any number of philosophical or emotional problems associated with the ghost in the machine, but Alone With You avoids going too far off the map. Your friends aren’t exactly comfortable in their new existence, but they seem to accept it for what it is; a construct necessary to get you home.
While talking with four colonists drives Alone With You’s somber narrative, most of the actual game is composed of surveying missions across the devastated planet. Various facilities correspond with each colonist’s area of expertise. Greenhouses, communication hubs, natural cave systems, recreational areas, and zones for technical experiments compose most of these environments.
Ostensibly, the AI needs you to scour each area for a myriad of parts or information to help build your escape craft. Along the way, however, you’re witness to any manner of cold death and destruction. Alone With You has a raw edge of gruesome, isolated horror sharpening every environment. No matter where you go, you’re sure to find expired corpses or a sense of muted carnage. The game’s lo-fi aesthetic denies explicit detail, instead allowing these vignettes to pass over and through the player like second hand smoke. It’s there and, in its own way, kind of intoxicating, but the air of responsibility is mostly avoided. It remains, however, a sobering reminder of the fate of your virtual companions.
Serviceable gameplay components make up the bulk of your activity. Locked rooms demand passwords and, in a rare instance of trust and freedom, aren’t sourced from a word bank. Like the adventure games of decade’s past, Alone With You demands mastery of the environment in order to deduce the proper password. It’s not that hard, essential notes can be read multiple times and clues are basically everywhere, but it this somehow didn’t stop me from getting stumped a few times. As always, the answer’s practically in front of your face.
The remainder of Alone With You is limited to marching around grim scenes and scanning materials with a generic device. Bits of backstory are peppered in on occasion, but otherwise it’s a lot of walking around and trying to figure out which faceless item the AI needs you to scan. This, I assume, will be the greatest impediment to replaying Alone With You. There is a certain incentive to repeating your adventure—your companions can have different reactions based on the candor of your responses, with narrative implications both large and small—the sheer tedium of collecting everything over again, however, may be enough to politely decline a second helping.
Alone With You’s lean visual aesthetic is particularly appealing to my sensibilities. Recently, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole with some of the Sega CD’s brighter offerings. I can appreciate the then-impressive sprite scaling and rotation that defined games like Soulstar and Thunderstrike, along with the adventure elements that backed Rise of the Dragon and Snatcher. Alone With You’s flat planes are supported by the player’s sprite moving across them with satisfying poise, boasting a chunky character with an altogether different feel than the tiny sprites featured in most pixel-based titles. The blue/pink/purple pastel pallet and the eerie electronic music also do well to compliment Alone With You’s isolated and personal sense of exploration.
Alone With You is also billed a romance adventure. While this is technically true, it certainly doesn’t follow the model established by BioWare titles, or other games where you essentially put friendship points into someone until they sleep with you. Alone With You’s conversations are slightly more nuanced, and can only be driven in that direction a handful of times over the course of the game. The results are tangible if not slightly unfulfilling, as if resolution were obscured by a desire to tidy up the plot.
Does science drive humanity or does humanity drive science? Alone With You’s response is indirect, but it functions as a furtive vector to further thought and consideration. It’s an earnest story that finds its form as a gateway to bigger questions, and while the game isn’t especially adept at subtext, it does succeed in challenging the player to ask what’s most valuable in a perilous situation.
Alone With You sometimes suffers inside of its medium, an understandable impedance of a small project that simply can’t be good at everything. Its eagerness to sidestep conventional challenges with singular objectives, however, will last longer than some of its prosaic mechanics. Valuable science fiction maintains a crucial element of humanity, a facet of storytelling Alone With You embraces with, of all possibilities, relatable human beings.
