A couple months ago I got really taken with this game called One Hour One Life-- and I'd like to talk about it a little because, despite it's glaring issues, it's an incredibly unique game with a premise I'd love to see visited in a different way.

So the premise is this-- When you start the game it searches for a female player ~16-40 minutes into their "hour", and you are born to them. You have no say in your gender, race, or anything. You're born and for the first 5 or so minutes you are completely and utterly dependent on your mother. If she chooses to ignore you, doesn't feed you or name you, give you clothes or other items, you die. The end. 

It's a "survival/social" game, but-- I want to talk about that in a minute. You have 60 minutes per session at max, given that you aren't murdered or die early. Each minute is another year of your life. 

The idea is that players work together over multiple lifetimes/generations/migrations to build a large functioning stable society and to continue your family line. Since reproduction in-game is automatic and involved only female characters rather than a 2-player situation, players born as men are generally relegated to the more outside the city tasks like resource gathering or hunting, or more time-consuming tasks like blacksmithing, while players born as women spend the majority of their time either raising children or operating in simpler production tasks like sewing, organizing, etc., so that when they have kids they aren't miles from the city or food. 

Food is the central issue facing most towns. Raising crops is time and resource intensive, but everyone has a hunger meter that constantly, angrily winds down. You can get a boost that prolongs the meter by eating a diverse selection of foods, but for most developing cities this is a luxury unlikely to be found except for more adventurous hunters or if you're lucky enough to have a baker. Ultimately, the size of the city and how many people it can support revolve entirely around its food production. 

As a child your game-chat is limited to 1 character at first, then 2, 3, and so on as you age. So you have to communicate your needs with limited means. It's actually quite effective. When you need food as a baby you will be able to type just an "F". Anything more complex is impossible. 

There's three ways your game can start. 

1) You are born to a mother in a developing/developed city. This is the way most people are born as there is typically the most people around to give birth to you. The game is balanced in the background by giving mothers around a lot of food the most children. 

2) You are born as Eve. This is the most difficult situation to find yourself in, and most Eves fail. The game occasionally starts a new geneology by birthing a player as a 20-something young woman who is tasked with not only finding an appropriate place to settle in the global map (on foot with nothing or even any clothes), but also balancing the birth and feeding of maybe 10 or more children. It is incredibly difficult. The game tends to put this role in the hands of more experienced players, but it can happen to anyone upon logging in. 

3) You are born to an Eve. If your mother is good, she will be raising you along with many siblings who may or may not survive childhood. You will work hard and probably die young. 

All civilizations are on the same map. The eventual grand goal of the game is to have massive sprawling interconnected cities with advanced technology. As of this writing, this goal is unmet. The game came out 2 years ago and in 2020 only 400 some odd towns have even built a sort of milestone "monument" (large, complex structure).

When you hit 60 minutes(years), your character dies. That's it. The game actively seeks to keep you from being born into the same city or family quickly, so chances are you'll never even see the works your family/descendents build. The best you'll get is a geneology provided to you on the games website. 



This is interesting if you're interested in how things played out with your children or siblings, and you can trace the lineage of everyone born into your family tree including their last words. 

The game encourages role playing and quick deep investment in both your settlement and surroundings. 

As far as actual gameplay goes, this is where the interesting, beautiful idea starts to fall apart. 

Actually accomplishing things in the game is obtuse. Maddeningly obtuse. 

Let's say you want to make a backpack. This is an item vital to your civilization as it allows you to carry more than one item at a time. To do anything with any sort of complexity, it's almost required. The steps to producing it are as follows-

1. Find a rock. 
2. Beat the rock against a boulder to make a sharp rock. This boulder may or may not be within a years walk of you. 
3. Find wild cotton.
4. Take the seeds first or you've fucked your entire civilization to never have rope. 
5. Plant the cotton seeds.
6. Grow the cotton.
7. Harvest several bits of cotton. 
8. Pick up the individual strands of cotton and combine them together one at a time. 
9. Do this a couple more times.
10. Now you have rope. 
11. Get sticks.
12. Combine with rope.
13. Now you have a rabbit trap. 
14. Find wild carrots
15. Get the seeds of the wild carrots first or else you've fucked your entire civilization to never have carrots. 
16. Grow carrots. 
17. Find wild berries. 
18. Find a flat rock in the mountains or in the desert. 
19. Find reeds
20. Make a basket
19. Find clay
20. Get clay with basket
21. Build a forge (this is it's own entire process)
22. Make a bowl.
23. Combine carrots and berries in a bowl
24. Smash with sharp rock.
25. Pour mash onto flat rock. 
26. Set rabbit trap.
27. Pour mash onto trap.
28. Wait for rabbit to get caught.
29. Retrieve dead rabbit
30. Skin rabbit with sharp rock
31. Take it's bones
32. Make more string with cotton. 
33. Skin 6 more rabbits. This will require more mash bait. 
34. Cut the rabbit fur into several very specific sizes.
35. Use needs to sew rabbit fur.
36. You now have a backpack. 

So this is one of the simpler tasks in the game. This is why it requires people all performing different roles. You can't farm, make clothes, and hunt. It's not possible. You have to rely on others to do some of the work. This is where the problems begin.

The game teaches you none of this at all, the tutorial shows you how to interact with objects and that you need to eat, but as far as "how do I do anything", you mostly have to rely on other players to teach you. In theory this deepens the simulation/role playing, but in practice it's very difficult. 

Number one, actually communicating in game is difficult. Even as an adult you're limited in the amount of characters you can type at once, which naturally leads to shorthand, some of which is very "you've been playing the game awhile". This can make teaching someone something have another layer of obfuscation. If someone says "get town fert," for example, they're asking you to head to pits out in the (hopefully) nearby marshlands and basket out some rich soil to put on plants. But without detailed explanations or someone just walking out and showing you, you can't learn that. The problem then is that they're probably working on something else and don't have time to take you out and show you. 

I played the game for a full week before I ever learned how to take care of the most basic of plants-- it took me nearly a whole month to figure out how to make a single pair of wooden shoes, one of if not the simplest items to make in the entire game. 

Then there's tool usage. Let's say someone asks you to dig a hole. Congrats, if you did that, you just learned one of your few skills you get to learn in your life. Digging! Now you can learn less things. Even if you IRL know how to use every tool, you can't do it all in game. You'll have to ask other players to do it for you, and for some things this can be very difficult. It once took me a full lifetime to get the materials together to get someone ELSE to write on a piece of paper to unlock a door because for the first 15 minutes I wasted all my tool/learning slots on cooking materials before the town came to a crisis about a locked gate. Only people in the same genelogical family can open a gate unless you write a message on a piece of paper and tack it to a gate, something I have no idea how people ever figured out. The problem was all the members of this family were now male and old and didn't know their grandfathers password, and someone had put all the generator fuel behind the gate. 

Speech is also local only. The people need to be in your line of sight to see what they're saying, and the speech bubble can be obscured by items or objects. 

When it comes to gameplay, simply, it's a fucking hot ass mess. 

It's at odds with the idea of the game, truly. Because to actually play the game, it may take life after life after life after life of trying to learn things only to be stifled by bear attacks, invasions from other villages, tools breaking and taking 20 minutes to rebuild-- and inventory management is equally awful. 

There are no "cabinets" or chests really that players can build. You can build boxes, but those boxes may hold only 4-5 items. And there's hundreds of things. In developed,  highly active towns tools/or other objects can be spread over a massive area, all just sitting on the ground taking up a very large tile. Only one object per tile. This includes children. So if you're trying to sit down a kid to feed another kid, you may have to walk away from the town just to do it. It's infuriating. 



Here's a good example. Just objects lying all over, incredibly important ones. 

So-- there's two basic things in this game working against each other. 

One-- you must communicate with other players to learn/grow as a "player" in the game, and two-- there isn't enough time really to both GROW the town/maintain it and to learn. "good" players are always busy, never stop moving, and barely talk, but the social experience needs to be there to build your relationship to the town and to the others within it. How do you know what needs to be done or built if you can't communicate with anyone? That's the problem. 

There just isn't enough time in the game to do both. People who talk a lot and spend time getting to know people are looked at as lazy, and in some cases you may actually be killed for doing it. I've seen people stab players who talk too much, or literally beat them to death. The game incentivizes preserving resources over communicating in many cases. This is rare, obviously there is communication, but its largely reserved to mothers/children. 

But when it does work-- it makes it even more upsetting because there is so much potential here. Let me give you an example.

I was born once (as a man) to a woman who was trying to build a memorial to her grandfather who had been killed by a snake earlier in the towns' life. She had this hat he had made for her and she gave it to me. I helped her gather wood with my sister, who got lost in the woods and we never saw her again. My mom went to try and find her-- and she never came back either. So now I have my great grandfathers hat and this story, and one older sister who I saw periodically. I told her what happened, and she gave me a backpack our mom had made us with a sewing needle in it. I was able to make a coat with it, and then I saw this guy who had a cart full of shoes. He had snakeskin boots, an item that is incredibly hard to make. He was a travelling shoe maker who had come to our city from a dying town up north. None of the women had had a daughter, so the town was doomed. There weren't anymore kids and that was that. He took some resources and started making shoes for our village. I told him I liked his boots, and he traded me a pair of wooden shoes for the coat. 

I decided to become a gravedigger for the town, and went around picking up bones from the village and put them in a graveyard and collected stones to mark them. I spent a lot of time trying to find my Mom/sisters bodies to bury, but never did. When I was getting older I went up to dump some bodies and saw a super old guy in the snakeskin boots waiting to die. It was the old shoe maker. I told him I would make sure he was buried with a marker, and he thanked me by giving me his shoes. We talked together until he evaporated into bones, and I did my part to bury him. I wore the shoes proudly until my time too was up, giving my whole hand-me-down outfit to my niece with the story given to her as best as I could tell it in 10 character sentences, then I died. 

I really contributed nothing to the longevity of the town, but the experience of that life has stuck with me. The reality is that it was waste of resources to keep me fed and in that town because of how the game actually works. Graveyards are nice, but they don't actually contribute anything other than a preservation of quickly forgotten player character names.

The social system of the game just isn't designed to facilitate the stories the game is actually trying to tell. Long-term city projects are almost always abandoned when the people aiming for them die unless you get lucky with a player looking for something to do outside of the garden. 

I admire the idea, on one hand, of knowledge having to be passed person to person, but if the game is trying to be a fast forward simulacrum of city development/human interaction, being able to pass down knowledge is incredibly imporant. The way the game should work, in my opinion, is that genealogical knowledge should be able to be passed down. If you learn how to use an axe, you should be able to give that to your children for free, this incentivizes both learning new things and caring for your children-- as foundational knowledge like "you can grow plants" will naturally lead to "you can produce propane". I played the game for over 300 hours and I still have no fucking clue how to make fuel or even make a wheelbarrow. 

There just needs to be some kind of way to transmit that information over biological lines. It would require "gamifying" the thing a little more rather than the resource gathering minigames currently present, but instead of cities constantly dying due to growing to big to direct socially over its limited means, it could actually reach something more meta. Instead of constantly trying to fertilize berry plants, the later goals should be building roads, developing a culture, jobs, etc. None of this is currently possible with the tools available. 

As it stands, every single town or city is constantly stuck in a loop of trying to develop advanced technologies while knowledgable players die with their knowledge and things circle back to trying to maintain a supply of carrots. Mass production isn't possible. In all my time playing I found one city with one half built rail system. No one knew who even built it or how it worked, and this was only like generation 8. The town lasted another 3 generations after me before dying out. Onto the next Eve. 

I have so many feelings about what this game could be but just isn't and can't be. But it's so close. It's the closest anyone has gotten to a game like this. 

The games creator, for example, has posted imaged and talked about what it'll be like when players learn to build cars and planes and visit other cities and develop trade routes. But this isn't possible. Even if you have a car, you still have to hunt rabbits. You can't breed them, can't mass produce clothing, can't develop better farm tech-- there's no reason to build a plane when you are always stuck trying to find someone who can bake a pie, still trying to dig more wells. 

So how do you fix this? How do you take this concept and build a game that works toward this goal in a more imaginative way? I think I'll have this in another post.