Alone With You: Review

You're the only person left alive on a space colony that has seen better days. There's a ton of mystery surrounding what happened before you enter the scene. Not only is there cloudy information what has happened to the colony, it's equally unknown who you actually are. What we do know is that you're suited up like a space man from the 1980's, including a fabulous flowing red scarf. We also know you have a scanner at your disposal which you will use to reveal clues, solve puzzles and ultimately discover what happened to the people that were living in the colony before the disaster.

Alone With You starts off displaying an old school style of graphics, which for some will be off putting right off the bat. For me, and those with a little bit of experience (age) behind them, you'll see nothing but nostalgia and you'll be reminded of how cool games looked when you were a kid. They didn't have cutting edge graphics like we would describe today, but back then, these graphics were mind blowing.
You take control quite early of your space man and head on over to Colony A where you meet an AI system. Basically throughout the game the AI will be your only companion, however with the use of some seriously Sci-Fi technology, the AI will be able to recreate some of the dead colonists to get their help in preparing an escape space ship, for you to escape.

Most of Alone With You is spent reading like in a text adventure. Reading dialogue between your character and the AI and other AI systems that you encounter. When you are required to go out and spelunk for bits and pieces to fix the escape ship, the most that you'll be doing here is walking around and scanning different things, with the hopes that you find what you're after. For a while here, the story line carries the game play and is quite intriguing with the unique 1980's style Sci-Fi feel that it has. I was hooked on the story and the minor game play puzzles that were disappointingly easy were slightly forgiven.
There aren't too many puzzles or "game" elements to be had here and the ones you are faced with are quite simple and won't take too long to work out if you're a seasoned gamer. Clues all but give away the solution to most of the puzzles that the game tries to throw at you. Well fear not, because like I said, the story line was carrying the game along just nicely.

That was until the game decided to outstay its welcome. Not because the game is too long, but because nothing interesting enough to keep me on board happened. There is this looming mystery of what happened to all the people in the colony, but the keen need to find out started to diminish as time went on with no real spikes in enjoyment. The game's tag line suggests that it's a Sci-Fi Romance Adventure. As far as Sci-Fi goes, that's a fair call and that part of the game is pretty spot on. The romance part of the game ventures no nearer to romance than cheesy small talk like what you'd expect from nervous ten year old kids in the park together dealing with puppy love. Sure it's an adventure and there is some romance in there but unless you're more interested in a long mysterious story that takes a little too long to unfold, you might want to look elsewhere.
It might sound like I didn't enjoy my time with Alone With You, and that's definitely not the case. I did enjoy the game, but there were areas that could have been approached better. I loved the old school appearance and simplistic control scheme, but I feel that it just dragged on for longer than it needed to. I kept going because I wanted to know what happened, but I did contemplate giving up and moving on. Of course I'll leave the ending details alone so as to not spoil anything, but I pressed through to the end and I was left with a decent sense of satisfaction after the ending. Alone With You is a reasonable game that will appeal to those that love the read of a good book with a little bit of interaction to be had.