Once Alive

I went into Once Alive expecting a polished walking simulator and found something messier and more interesting: a debut solo project with genuine heart buried under some real rough edges. Cem Boray Yildirm spent three years teaching himself game development from scratch to make this, and that context matters when you're deciding whether its imperfections are dealbreakers or part of the story. You play as James, who along with his brother believes they are the last survivors of a viral outbreak that killed most of humanity sixteen years prior. A hand-painted banner promising refuge draws them toward HaustVille, a walled settlement that turns out to be completely empty. The mystery of what happened here is the engine that runs the whole experience. The game is structured across three acts, and each house in the village holds notes, objects, and ghostly speech echoes - fragments of memory that slowly piece together what happened to the community. When those environmental threads pay off, particularly a subplot about livestock and feral animals that critics specifically praised for its originality within the genre, the world-building feels genuinely considered in a way that bigger productions sometimes fail to achieve. The mechanical toolkit is thin, which is the honest truth about this genre. There is a brief physics puzzle early on, where you free-hand a plank across a gap to enter the settlement, and a handful of quick-time events that break up the pacing. Neither gets revisited with any depth, which reviewers across the board flagged as a missed opportunity. The character walks slowly enough that the run button barely helps, and the journal and inventory exist mostly as window dressing. If you need active challenge woven into your narrative games, this will feel inert. The voice acting is the biggest structural problem. Line delivery is stilted throughout, and the main character has a habit of narrating conclusions out loud that the player could have reached independently, which blunts the immersion the environments work hard to build. Facial animations, powered by MetaHuman inside Unreal Engine 5, misfire in cutscenes and create a distracting uncanny valley effect. Performance optimization is also uneven, with texture pop-in and frame dips reported across hardware configurations. And yet. The visuals when the engine is behaving are genuinely striking. The desolate streets of HaustVille carry a specific kind of loneliness that the soundtrack leans into carefully, and the background score was praised across multiple reviews for matching the tonal weight of the mystery. The game runs somewhere between ninety minutes and three hours depending on how thoroughly you explore, and at that length it mostly knows when to end. There is one fixed ending and no branching, which is the right call for a story this focused. Steam players gave it a Very Positive rating, which reflects a community that went in understanding the genre and was rewarded by the atmosphere rather than punished by the technical gaps. Once Alive sits in the same shelf space as Everyone's Gone to Rapture and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, drawing explicit comparisons from reviewers. It does not match the polish of either, but it carries a sincerity that those titles, made by full studios, do not quite replicate. This is one person deciding to make the game he wanted to exist in the world, and the result is flawed in ways that a competent producer would have fixed and genuine in ways that a committee probably would have sanded away. If you read notes in abandoned houses and feel something, this game was made for you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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