
Dead But Alive is a 120,000 words zombie zombie survival visual novel set in South England. The game features a non-linear storyline with moral choices on despair, commitment and sacrifice.
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Languages: English
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Themes across 46 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
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Hat's off to you, Niels Bauer Games. This game had lasting consequences, nonlinear gameplay, mysteries that were fun puzzles, moral choices, and even romance. To top it off, it had fun resource management and risk assessment. Artistically, the game is beautiful. The story took itself seriously and the characters were interesting. It's one of the few games I made it to the end of. It's fun for what it is. But the dev is as gone as it gets. Niels Bauer's biggest series was "Smugglers," the next "Empires and Dungeons." They also made "TV Manager" (TV Tycoon). And then, times began changing. Dev tools to make games became more common. Unity, unreal engine, etc. They were no longer one of the few indie developers. They were one of many. To survive in this business, he had to diversify. He chose to focus on beautiful 2d art and story, with their traditional nonlinear gameplay. Consider it a telltale game with more emphasis on resource management. The game was released in late 2015. Then it was re-released in 2016, and rebuilt in Renpy as "version 2." To my disappointment, version 2 didn't work for me. After hours of entertaining gameplay, the ending sequence couldn't be started due to a bug. I went back to version 1, which I found was both graphically and gameplaywise better. In a way this wasn't so bad. It was different enough that I didn't want to give up on it. A year passes, and the dev aggressively pins his hopes on Smugglers. They were initially very attentive and supportive to the users who played this game, but now chose to ignore most of the forums on Dead but Alive. You went to his website and clicked forum? It took you to the Smugglers 5 greenlight page. You went to the "Updates" section? It took you to the smuggler 5 bundle. Don't believe me? Well go to their website right now. https://web.archive.org/web/20180412140559/http://www.nielsbauergames.com/deadbutalive.html Yes, that's a web.archive of their now closed down webpage. The last screenshots were of them asking for an 80% discount sale on the game. But other than that, it looks identical to the first screenshot. They never gave us an update on this game and where it was going. In fact, they had another website, but it would redirect you to "Niels Bauer Bundle." I tried emailing him a while back, but postmaster told me he couldn't be found. It seems the last posts of the dev were in 2018 asking for help on a gamekit forum. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197971133204/posthistory/ He's been completely silent for four years, and avoided discussing his game for 6. But even when he wasn't, according to users, he would delete complaints about Smugglers 5, netting him negative reviews. Perhaps he just broke? Gave up? Lost interest? The reason that although I liked the game, I can't recommend it is that the game ends on a note "TO BE CONTINUED" but it won't be. It's dead and dead. I hope one day, the developer will stop by, and toss out some ideas for how the sequel would have gone and how the game would end..
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Hours played at review time, across 46 reviews with recorded playtime.
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great game with mix element of simulation, visual novel but I still think this game is too short with this price, I hope It will have much more contents than that :D
You should consider yourself lucky this game is no longer available. My experience with it has to be one of the worst I ever had with any game. When you try launching it, first thing you get is a screen telling you "If game is not launching please look for help in the game forum" which was already a red flag.. especially as game indeed was not launching, so i went to the game forum and found a solution which required me to put the game into beta. That did help with it, though whether I should be happy about being able to actually play it or not is another question altogether. I started a new game and I was instantly on day 6, not sure if that was intended, but if yes, there was little to no explanation why you just skipped so many days, felt like you were just thrown in the midst of things happening, which some games have done well, but this is anything but. Art felt really low effort, writing was weak and makes it extremely hard focusing on it or really caring at all about reading it or the story which as this game claims to be a visual novel is a huge issue. Nothing is explained well; UI looks and feels so bad that it alone just makes me want to uninstall the game. Do not waste your time on this one, there are infinite numbers of better games out there. Overall score 1/10.
Honestly a very fun experience, and a zombie apocolypse story with a unique playing style. I don't think I've seen a zombie game quite like this one. Well done and diverse characters and fun romance scenes. Some lacklusters components, very short, and a questionable ending though. All together a 7.5/10
Game doesn't run. Developers are inactive
Awful game. I don't normally review games I haven't completed but even before I ran into a game-breaking bug I was completely fedup with this game. It's just an appalling mish-mash of zombie survival + visual novel. The characters are stereotypical and lack depth. The conversation is stilted and boring, oftentimes with different people saying the same line at different stages. The text explaining the survival bits where you weigh up and embark on different resource runs is poorly written, boring and repetitive. There's so many elements that just seemed half baked, like key survivor health levels. Or the fact one of my group kept begging for a new kitchen, despite that fact that when I got it I never used it as it was far more cost effective in resrouce time to go scavenge food! Anyway, the consequences of running out of food or making too much noise never materialise either so you can forget about worrying about that new kitchen! The 'cost' of certain actions doesn't match what is stated e.g. cooking costs 2 resource + 1 food when you have the new kitchen and even when I had that it wouldn't complete at times. Other times it would ask for 60 ammo for something but I could still complete the action with far less! It's just all-round awful, bugged, amateurish and rough as all hell and that full-price ticket it is a joke. I got it for ~£3 and I still feel ripped off. I'm refunding this and if I don't get the refund I will be deleting it from my account. Never has a game made me so annoyed, and the game breaking bug was just the icing on the cake! FYI, my bug was the plot was no longer advancing after I got the tank. The days kept advancing but no story materialised. We were supposed to use the tank to rush a bandit camp and it never happened. Dev options did appear for some reason in the bottom corner of the game, for some reason, which would let me skip around plot points but I was just too fed up at that stage to continue.
Terrible unfinished game with scripting errors when it comes to events, poorly written characters, and a 2.5-hour length that ends with a "To Be Continued" screen. Well, it's been 5 years. Don't expect it to get continued. Full video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq6DGNYOXXQ
This is an interactive short story without any real gameplay element. Wtf with the ending? Less pointless talk, much game please!
What a truly terrible game
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