Alone With You is a narrative sci-fi adventure that takes place in the ruins of a doomed space colony. It’s your job to try and put together what caused the colony to fall apart and how the colony’s most important chief officers died as you and the AI, the last “living” soul left on this imploding planet, race to rebuild an escape ship.
While the stakes are high, the days pass in a gentle and reliable routine. You wake up. You go to the AI, who tells you what your options for the day are. You go out to the shuttle pod. You select what area of the doomed colony you’ll be exploring - you’re only ever returning to the same handful of locations.
At the end of the day, the AI sets up a holographic simulation of the colony officer who was in charge of the location you chose to explore. The simulations know that they aren’t technically alive, but they don’t know how they died, and your search for their answers helps motivate them to solve the problems of your ship.
At least, in a narrative sense. Your search for their answers is really of benefit to your own natural curiosity and has nothing to do with the gameplay mechanics. The mechanics are, in fact, pretty sparing: you explore a location, you solve extremely simple puzzles to find the information you need, and you leave.
Even the dialogue options with the holo-sims are simple. You can tackle them in any order and don’t lose out on the opportunity to ask any of your questions based on your responses. You only miss out on asking a question if you fail to find the personal item that prompts it. If you don’t find that item on one of your exploring missions, you may miss out on part of a character’s story, but all the sims are still gung-ho about helping you put your escape ship together.
As for the sims themselves, they represent one-half of Alone With You ’s beating heart. All four of the holographic sims are carefully designed to appeal to different types of people. You have Winnie, an introverted, depressive writer; Leslie, who loves gardening but hates conflict; Pierre, who didn’t realize how much he was needed; and Jean, who didn’t realize what everyone would think.
While their personalities feel fleshed-out and real, it’s their reaction to their own nature as holographic simulations that is most interesting. Alone With You touches lightly on this ground, as all the sims are focused on a task that is more important than how they feel about their nature as digital ghosts, but it’s one of the most interesting aspects of what is described as a sci-fi romance.
The other half of Alone With You ’s heart lies with the AI, which doesn’t have a proper name, just a number designation. Helpful, kind, motivated to make its colonists happy as well as keep them safe, the AI never turns on you as I half-expected, never fragments or turns monstrous. Instead, its motivations as well as its pain at learning of the tragic fate of so many of the colonists it was created to care for is the key to Alone WIth You’ s final act.
You come to know the AI more intimately than any of the holo-sims, as it is your constant companion and guide who frets over you and who created these sims for you in the first place. As a result, the ending(s) to Alone With You are narratively pleasing, no matter how bittersweet they are. Poignant and delicate, to say more would spoil them.
Despite the setting’s grim desolation, with tragedy in both the past and possibly the future, there is love at every turn. The holo-sims all care about your survival, and the AI clings to your escape like you’re its last hope for heaven. Even the mementos you might find scattered in a room overtaken by vines or half-buried in rubble speak to the power of human connections, broken by death perhaps, but important to those who lived them.
Finally, Alone With You ’s pixel-art aesthetic is common among indie games, but its cinematic quality and soft, pastel palette isn’t. I could live without the distressed filter added over the art, but I love the color choices and the film-like feel of the holo-sim cutscenes, as well as other shots like those of exiting and entering the shuttle pod. I also appreciate the ethnic diversity of your love interests as well as the player character’s ambiguous gender, subtle touches that open up the game’s appeal.
Replay value is present, but minimal, especially if you missed an item while exploring. Gameplay mechanics are barely elevated above that of a walking sim; the puzzles are simple enough for a young child to work out on their own. There aren’t even that many items for you to scan and find, and the daily grind gets repetitive, especially all those pointless steps between your bedroom, the AI’s room, the holo-sim room and the shuttlebay. But the ideas Alone With You evokes about digital existence after death, about coping with loss, about connections, their disruption and their absence, will stay with you long after the game is over.
Alone With You is available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita at a $9.99 asking price.
