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Playing I Am Alive (demo). It's quite poor.
It's overtaken Gears of War as the greyest game ever. It's also more linear... Silent Hill, back in 1999, had a more open destroyed city than this, and with more atmosphere too.
Mr Boring arrives back Haventon (HAVENTON?) in search of his lost personality. Despite a year of dust storms, earthquakes and plain old exposure to the elements, the cars on the bridge aren't caked in filth and all the writing on them is still completely legible. Spingfield-style, it also seems to be the Only Bridge Out Of Town. He negotiates the bridge by climbing as slowly as possible over it, perhaps because he has no stamina left from walking across the entire continent over the course of a year. Over the course of this year he's only thought to bring some rope, an empty gun he hasn't bothered finding ammunition for, and a camcorder that he's somehow keeping charged. He also has a single can of food (no can opener, so he must be depending on every can he finds to have a ring pull) and a single bottle of water, which he throws away after drinking rather than hold on to to collect more.
Mr Boring dies when I hit 'A' to make a tutorial message go away. This is because the message doesn't go away the first time, so I hammer A and then it does and then he does a 'climbing jump' to a rung easily within his grasp, and then runs out of stamina and dies because he can't pull himself onto a girder with some little bars along the top.
Eventually he reaches the city. A man sitting in the sewer tells him to fuck off. Out on the street, people terrorize a woman. Despite having just climbed up and over a fucking bridge, Mr Boring can't climb over a knee-high concrete barrier blocking the street, and instead goes down an alley to be ambushed by a man with a machete. Pulling out his empty gun, he forces the man back to a pit and then kicks him in. The cutscene shows the man, machete in hand, flying backwards into the pit. Then the machete somehow appears on the ground several feet from the pit and Mr Boring picks it up. Falling approximately five feet has killed the unknown man, and Mr Boring uses the machete to somehow break the tempered steel of a chain and lock around a gate.
Immediately two bad people appear out of thin air and menace him. Mr Boring hacks them up. The first man had a single round in his gun, which Mr Boring takes, but discards the gun. More bad men approach with machetes of their own. Unfortunately for Mr Boring, he can only kill people when prompted by the game, and so stands and watches while they stab him in the neck repeatedly and he dies. I use up a 'retry' and the same happens again. I'm now out of retries and have to return to the sewer, even though there are no obstacles to overcome between the sewers and the bad men encounter, just wasted time. Thanks, game.
I manage to kill the bad men on another attempt and proceed, finding a bottle of painkillers someone has left sitting in an alley. When I say bottle of painkillers, I mean one painkiller, as after one use they're gone and Mr Boring throws away another potential water container. I also find a medical kit in a crevasse in the street, just sitting there. As I round the corner (marking off on the map as I go all the arbitrary barriers as I go) I see I can't pass yet another concrete barrier. This would be explained that 'there's also barbed wire fences behind it' except there's a two foot wide gap in the fences, that Mr Boring could easily fit through. Never mind. On a nearby bench, out in the open, a woman cradles her stabbed son. I give them the medical kit, which apparently only contained one bandage, to save his life. She laments over the state of things.
On the next road, a woman seems to be passing the time by waiting on the doorstep of her building for people to walk past so she can shout threats at them. I find my old apartment and go inside. My wife has left me a letter on the doorstep.
Despite having a full battery in my camcorder ten minutes ago, my next video diary suggests it's now half empty on the display. Everything shakes violently, an aftershock, like the woman in the alley mentioned. I wonder what happened to the potential rape victim I saw earlier, as if Mr Boring the great climber couldn't get over those knee-high barriers then the rape gang surely couldn't, and there's no other routes through the city.
Despite a year of earthquakes, and the fact my family has been gone almost as long, the little glass they kept their toothbrushes in on the bathroom sink hasn't fallen over. Indeed, apart from the garbage all over the floor (from where?) the most disturbed part of the house seems to be the Venetian blinds which are slightly out of alignment to allow only broken rays of sunlight inside.
In the kitchen I find a single can of fruit cocktail. Either that really was all they had left, or looters broke in and took everything but HATE fruit cocktail and left it behind, out on the counter.
I go outside and hear a child crying for its mother. Mr Boring doesn't recognize his own daughter's voice, and has to approach her to realize it's her. When she realizes it's him, she stops to scream before running away.
Mercifully, the demo ends. Unlock more boring exposition, washed out graphics and terrible controls for only 1200 MS Points!
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I've had 1560 free points off them over 18 months, so I can't complain.
