The one dimension where I Am Alive shines without any qualifier is in sound and audio. Another dystopian future, another tight-lipped hero, right? Wrong. The hero of I Am Alive plays very much as you'd expect a man would, on the other side of a tragedy. The dialogue throughout the game's cut scenes works extremely well, and all the voice acting is high quality. The sounds of a bad future are sparse, considering how few people you come across in this wasteland. This makes it all the more surprising when you do stumble into a situation where you interact with other survivors, whether they have good or bad intentions. The extra element that heightens tension in I Am Alive is the soundtrack, which stays silent for the most part, but rises dynamically in response to flagging health and is at a fever pitch during dangerous moments. The music manages to raise your pulse as much or more than anything happening on-screen, which demonstrates how much of a difference quality audio design can make.

On the visual side, I Am Alive also excels. Not only did developer Ubisoft Shanghai achieve an impressive level of destruction, they built a game where clambering around on this destruction is a core mechanic. Now instead of just eyeing the devastation, you get to experience it firsthand. We've said before that the Unreal Engine lends a ghoulish cast to human characters; in this case, the effect seems apropos! Among the generally impressive landscape planning, I Am Alive features environmental effects such as the choking dust that becomes an antagonist in its own right, and fire that can be used as a prop when fighting enemies. Clearly there was a desire to make I Am Alive as much about surviving in extreme conditions as it is about battling other survivors. Extra credit on both graphics and sound. They are truly the highlights of the game.

The trend for survival horror games in years past has been a bit schizophrenic. Gamers old enough to remember playing the first generation of franchises like Resident Evil now have to be a bit puzzled at how that series in particular has gone to a heavier focus on firepower and playing the game aggressively. Most of the first games we played in this genre cast the lead character as pitifully weak (think Silent Hill) and constantly on the run from threats. I Am Alive takes us back to a time when playing a survival game was about using your head more than wielding a weapon. The execution is at times very good, but we found the game uneven in its delivery. The gist of the plot is that you play a man stranded on the opposite side of the country, away from his family at the time of a great crisis. We join the story at the point where he has returned to his home, looking for his wife and daughter after trekking for almost a year. As you might imagine, the dude is weary but wise. He's learned how to get around in the world and knows his way through most obstacles. What's left is how competently you manage the controls, and how quickly you can get into the mindset of a vulnerable survivor in a harsh world.

I Am Alive boils down to a series of challenges you face in the search for your family. There's some subtext in the game that reminded us of The Walking Dead, as far as the extent to which you'll go to achieve your goals. It's possible to play the game in a more or less bloodthirsty fashion, but even the player with the least aggressive instinct will find herself boxed in at times and forced to resort to some awful violence. We appreciated that I Am Alive didn't glamorize the violence. Bad guys are genuinely scary, and taking them out doesn't feel like a victory. Especially because of how limited resources are in the world around you, taking any damage during a fight can mean the difference between succeeding or failing the remainder of the level. In a similar vein, there aren't lots of extraneous challenges, or things you can do just to impress your friends and family. A legitimate complaint could be made that the game plays in a linear fashion, which we just interpreted as the severe restriction of choice one finds in a situation like the one depicted here. You may not be rushing back to replay I Am Alive, but the experience will stick with you.

The downside of realism and well-crafted A.I. is that there's a fine balance between making it hard and keeping it fun. I Am Alive struggled mightily in this dimension. We weren't so taken with the "do or die" mechanic used in the game, that gives you the thinnest of margins with which to win or lose at various places within each level. Restarting should be a terrible proposition, thanks to thoughtful slicing and dicing into waypoints. What we noticed was that the decisions made early in a level can matter greatly by the end of that level, or even in another level. You earn a "Retry" upon performing certain selfless actions, or can find these scattered in the game, and you'll need them when action sequences spin out of control and result in your death. Climbing around in the world is the most terrifying action you can take; this is the first game where rappelling can raise the hairs on your neck to almost the same degree as open combat. Managing stamina in addition to health felt unnecessarily complex. It detracted from the experience and made what should have felt like immersion more mechanical and about "gaming." The A.I. during interaction with enemies is so real and gritty that it felt cheap to introduce a mechanic where the secret to getting to the top of a rough climb may be ravaging your backpack for bottled water or soda. Really?

A plug is deserved for the A.I. We've never felt quite so exposed when confronted with enemy encounters, and it's only partly due to the fact that we were never packing more than one or two bullets. Intimidating and bluffing enemies never got old, even though there was some inconsistency between replays. We chalked this up to good A.I., in the sense that you won't be able to predict exactly how enemies behave. What you do learn are some simple rules, such as not trying to bluff desperate people holding loaded guns, and how to subdue angry guys with machetes when all you have is an empty gun. Kicking dudes off cliffs or backing them into burning fires are extreme examples of the brand of justice you'll deal out; as we mentioned earlier, this is a seriously gritty game.

The best games teach and remind you when they introduce non-standard dynamics, and I Am Alive is great about flashing instructions up on screen to give you a fighting chance at survival in this bleak world. It's not that the controls are radically different, but there are some special combinations that require explanation. We had to work long and hard, after years of playing Shooters, to resist pulling our weapon at each hint of danger. Hidden weapons play a big role in your survival strategy, and you learn to use them to your advantage, when your enemy least expects resistance. Since you never have many bullets, I Am Alive is about the least satisfying gun game ever invented... One shot kills enemies, and will kill you the same way, hence our caveat earlier about difficulty. Certain actions require repetitive tapping of a trigger button, which also burns precious stamina. Climbing works much like you've learned in action games, except you lose your ability to go slow and plan every handhold and toehold. In I Am Alive, you have to plan ahead or learn by falling about a thousand times, then tackle the climb in one swift series of awkward moves.

Come to think of it, almost everything about I Am Alive is awkward. Even though the protagonist is a seasoned survivor, life is extremely hard in his world, and you end up on the receiving end of this dynamic during the game. For most people, I Am Alive will be a fascinating but ultimately frustrating experience. The payoff is here, in terms of story and atmosphere, if you're willing to work through a lot of trial and error. Just reading a FAQ isn't going to do it for you in this game, because there's a lot of muscle memory that has to be wired right in order for you to master all of the challenges presented in I Am Alive. We appreciated the ambition and the solid execution of certain game elements, but unlike the mainstreaming of the Survival Horror game genre, this is still very much a niche experience.