Alone With You asks what you do with your last month alive when the only way out is to rebuild the dead. Benjamin Rivers developed and published it. It is a Sony PubFund game that launched exclusively on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, and it is also available on PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch. It is a puzzle-adventure in the indie mold, built from a side-view perspective with a heavy text component, and it carries science fiction, mystery and romance in equal measure.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
A Terraforming Colony With One Escape Pod
The setup is grim and clean. You are the sole remaining member of a doomed terraforming colony. The planet will crumble and implode in less than a month. Your only exit is a single escape pod, and it does not work.
The people who specialized in its systems are all dead, killed by the colony’s mysterious failure. That leaves the colony’s AI as your partner. Together you plan to get off the planet by recreating those key colony members and learning from them how to fix the ship, so you can both flee to safety.
It is a romance story wearing a disaster story’s clothes, or the other way around. Either reading works.
Rebuilding the Dead to Fix the Ship
The central mechanic follows directly from that premise. You recreate colony members, and the game’s adventure structure is built around meeting them, learning what they knew and carrying that knowledge back to the pod.
The game does not hand you a colony of strangers to shoot through. It hands you the colony members you bring back and asks you to spend your remaining time with them. The mystery of what killed the colony is the backdrop to that.
That is the trick Alone With You pulls off. The countdown is the reason every exchange matters.
A Side View and a Lot of Reading
Rivers builds the game in side view with text as the primary instrument. That is a deliberate, spare choice, and it puts the weight on writing and on the player’s imagination rather than on spectacle.
The platforms tell the story of the design: PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch. A game that ships on Vita and phones alongside a home console is a game that knows it is small and portable.
- PlayStation 4
- PlayStation Vita
- PC (Microsoft Windows)
- Mac
- iOS
- Android
- Nintendo Switch
Seven platforms for one quiet, text-heavy science fiction story. That is a wide net for a game this intimate.
The AI, the Pod, and the People You Make
The AI is the constant. It is the one presence that does not need to be reconstructed, and it is the one presence that shares your problem. You are both trying to leave.
The recreated colonists are the variable. Each one is a person the colony lost, brought back because their expertise is the only route to a working escape pod. Romance is one of the game’s themes, listed alongside science fiction and mystery.
This is where those themes stop being labels on a store page and start being the actual structure of play.
What a 7.3 Out of 10 Means Here
The published critical score for Alone With You sits at 7.3 out of 10, an aggregate drawn from nine outlets and recorded by IGDB. That is a good score with a ceiling on it, and the ceiling is honest.
A 7.3 is the number you give a game that does one thing very well and does not try to do everything. Alone With You is not a technical showpiece. It is not a long game. It is a game about a countdown, a broken pod and a cast of people you build yourself, and it commits to that.
The score also reflects what the game does not have. There is no combat loop to master, no open world to comb through, no systems stacked on systems. Players who need those things will find the side view and the text load thin.
Players who want a mystery with a romance inside it will find the opposite problem: not enough month, not enough people, and a premise that stays with them.
Why the Countdown Does the Work
The strongest thing in Alone With You is the pressure. Less than a month, one pod, no surviving specialists. Every mechanic in the game is downstream of that sentence.
The weakest thing is the same thing. A game built on a countdown has to keep the countdown feeling real, and a text-driven side-view adventure has limited tools for that. The premise carries more weight than the presentation can always return.
That imbalance is why 7.3 is the right number rather than a higher one. The idea is better than the execution in places, and the execution is still good enough to hold the idea up.
The Numbers Behind Alone With You
- Title: Alone With You
- Release year: 2016
- Developer: Benjamin Rivers
- Publisher: Benjamin Rivers
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PC (Microsoft Windows), Mac, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch
- Genres: Puzzle, Adventure, Indie
- Themes: Science fiction, Mystery, Romance
- Modes: Single player
- Perspective: Side view, Text
- Critical score: 7.3/10 (IGDB aggregate, 9 outlets)
- Note: Sony PubFund title; launched exclusively on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita
Our Score for Alone With You
Alone With You is worth your time if the pitch lands. A dying colony, a broken escape pod, an AI for a partner and a set of dead specialists you have to bring back to life to get off the planet. That is a strong premise, and Rivers does not waste it.
The game’s reach across seven platforms is the tell. This is a story built to travel, small enough to fit on a Vita or a phone and strange enough to be worth carrying there. It does not need a big screen. It needs your attention.
The 7.3 is fair. It is not a score that says the game failed. It is a score that says the game chose its battles and won most of them, and that the ones it lost were the ones it could not win with a side view and a text box. The romance and the mystery carry the middle. The countdown carries the rest.
If you have ever wanted a science fiction game that treats a conversation as the main event, this is the one. If you want the pod fixed fast, you will be waiting a long time, and that wait is the game.
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