Update Two Hundred and Forty-Three: 14 October 2018

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This one is actually NOT a VN - I misjudged it! It’s more like a point and click adventure game with no puzzles. In Alone With You, you play as the last surviving human on a terraforming mission on another planet. Things are dire, and the AI decides that it’s time to get you off this planet. You scavenge what you can, try to figure out what happened to the other colonists, all while the AI creates four simulations of four colonists that might be your ticket out.

It has its successes and failures - exploring the world is really fun, and the aesthetic holds up well. Everything feels and sounds retro, and I loved combing through each of the area and putting together what happened. The overarching story is interesting. It touts itself as a ‘romance’ game, but it really isn’t that - if anything you become friends with your hologram of choice. There’s nothing romantic about it, not really.

The game really falls apart after multiple playthroughs, of which you need to do a FULL FIVE to 100% clear it. I did two playthroughs, and oh boy did the seams become real apparent. There’s no real way to skip, so you have to play through EVERYTHING again (though there’s ways to do the bare minimum for the holograms you’re not committed to). Most egregious, a lot of the ‘special’ dialogue is recycled from person to person, which is very very aggravating.

I can’t power through all this - and even if I could, I lost my savegame (that I had to go in and dig out and set aside because you can’t manually save in this game), which would mean MORE replaying. I’m dropping this in ‘To Revisit’ for a couple of years from now when I remember less about what happens.

Next up:

See you soon!