I Am Alive opens with a man walking home through a city that no longer works. He has been gone almost a year. His name is never given. His wife, Julie, and his daughter, Mary, were last seen just before “The Event,” the worldwide disaster that killed most of the human race and left the fictional city of Haventon half-collapsed under toxic dust.
Ubisoft Shanghai’s survival game does not hand you power. It hands you a stamina meter and a machete, then asks what you are willing to do with them. The answer, across a seven-year development cycle and a digital-only release, is: less than you would like, and more than you expected.
Trailer, via Ubisoft.
Climbing Haventon on a Dwindling Meter
The climbing is the spine of I Am Alive. Every jump, every run, every beam you shimmy across drains stamina, and the meter only refills when the protagonist is on solid ground. Once his feet leave the ground, everything costs something — even hanging motionless.
The cost is not uniform. Jumping from one beam to another burns far more than sliding sideways along the same beam. That distinction matters, because the game punishes the wrong move with more than a fall. Run out of stamina mid-climb and you get a few seconds for one final exertion to reach solid ground. Make it, and a piece of the stamina meter itself is gone. Your maximum is now lower. The only way to restore it is a specific item.
Pitons help. They let the protagonist rest and recharge mid-climb, but each one works in a single location. Once placed into a wall, a piton cannot be removed. The system turns every ascent into a budget you cannot renegotiate.
Outside, at ground level, the dust does the work for you. It constantly depletes stamina, then health. The air itself is an enemy that never stops.
Mei’s Walkie-Talkie and Julie’s Note
The plot gives the mechanics a reason to hurt. The unnamed man returns to Haventon looking for Julie and Mary. In his apartment he finds a note from Julie: she and Mary left shortly after The Event, hoping to reach one of the emergency camps. She writes that she forgives him for everything.
Leaving the apartment, he sees a small girl he mistakes for Mary and saves her from three hostile men. Her name is Mei. Her mother went missing on a supply run. Mei gives him a walkie-talkie to reach Henry, a family friend, and Henry — disabled, unable to retrieve it himself — asks the protagonist to recover a radio transmitter.
The protagonist records updates on a video camera. An unidentified person watches them at some point in the future. That framing device sits over the whole game without ever explaining itself, and it is one of the few threads I Am Alive leaves deliberately loose.
A Drawn Gun With Nothing Behind It
Combat is built around scarcity, not skill. Against a group of hostiles, the protagonist can surprise a single enemy with a machete quick kill, fight one enemy at a time in melee, or draw his gun and try to intimidate the rest. Ammunition is not the point. The bluff is.
The developers said they were inspired by films including The Road and The Book of Eli, and that they wanted players to feel the emotions and moral quandaries of choosing who lives and who dies. That ambition shows up most clearly here. A drawn gun with nothing behind it is a better scene than a firefight, and I Am Alive knows it.
| Element | I Am Alive’s approach | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| Climbing | Stamina drains on every action; pitons are single-use per location | Tension that persists even when you stop moving |
| Failure | Final exertion costs a permanent piece of the stamina meter | Loss you carry forward, not a checkpoint reset |
| Hostiles | Machete kill, one-on-one melee, or intimidation with a gun | Scarcity that makes bluffing the smart play |
| Environment | Toxic dust depletes stamina and health at ground level | A city that attacks you for standing still |
Seven Years and Two Studios
I Am Alive’s production history is as rough as its setting. Darkworks began development in 2005, conceiving it as a first-person game called Alive. The project was postponed and re-announced multiple times across a seven-year cycle. Darkworks worked on it from 2005 to 2009. Ubisoft Shanghai then restarted development from scratch, keeping only the original pitch and the gameplay designs — minus the combat.
The scope shrank too. I Am Alive was planned as a full retail release and shipped as a digital-only title instead. It arrived on Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade in March 2012, on PlayStation 3 through the PlayStation Network in April, and on Windows through Steam and UPlay in September.
That is a lot of restarting for a game that runs on restraint. The final product feels like the survivor of its own development: pared down, a little thin in places, unwilling to waste anything.
A Pressure System, Not a City
The camera sits in third person and switches to first when the protagonist aims and shoots. It is a clean solution, and it keeps the shooting rare enough to stay frightening.
But the same discipline that makes the climbing work leaves other parts of Haventon underbuilt. The city is a set of pressures — dust, hostiles, height — rather than a place with a life of its own. The note from Julie and the walkie-talkie from Mei do more emotional work than the environments around them, and the video-camera framing never cashes out.
The moral-choice pitch is the strongest idea in the game and the least developed one. Choosing who lives and who dies is a real mechanic here, but the game rarely gives you enough context to feel the weight of a specific decision rather than the general dread of making one.
I Am Alive is a survival game that understands scarcity better than most games twice its budget. The stamina meter is the best thing in it: a resource that punishes you permanently for surviving, which is a genuinely uncommon idea. The pitons, the dust, the intimidation bluff — all of it coheres around the same principle, that the world takes more from you than it gives back.
What holds it at 6.9 rather than higher is what the seven-year cycle cost it. The restart from scratch left a game with a strong core and a hollow middle. Haventon is a pressure system, not a city. The characters who should anchor the story — Julie, Mary, Henry, Mei — arrive mostly as notes, voices, and errands. The future-watching camera is a hook with no line attached.
The mixed reception makes sense. Praise for the tone, the graphics, the combat, the climbing and the moral choices is earned. So is the complaint that a game this good at tension never quite becomes a game this good at anything else. I Am Alive is worth playing for the meter alone. Just do not expect the rest of it to hold your weight.
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