Never Be Alone: An AI Slop Money Grab

That forgot games are supposed to be FUN.

My cousin and I logged into Never Be Alone looking for a zombie survival game to play together. About ten minutes later, we quit to the menu and uninstalled it, and here I am.

So that went well.

Can we play now?

Within seconds, NPCs were dumping bookloads of text on us. What felt like hundreds of lines of “if this, then that” instructions. Immediately, I’m thinking, oh fuck, it’s AI slop.

The cadence. The pointless anecdotes. Lists that go thing, thing, thing, thing, and of course, thing. Every instruction needs another paragraph, and somehow we’re still talking.

An illustration of the pattern, NOT an actual quote:

“If you leave the settlement, be careful. If you encounter infected, stay alert. If you run low on supplies, gather more. You’ll need food, water, weapons, medical supplies, a sturdy backpack, a little courage, and of course, your wits. Old Thomas used to say a survivor without supplies is like a lantern without oil. We laughed back then. Nobody laughs much anymore. Because out there, every choice matters. Every shadow holds a secret. And every journey begins with a single step. A step that might not step past the steps of stepping. Step step AI AI AI AI AI SLOPPPPPP.”

Yes. Zombie game. Supplies. Understood. Can my cousin and I play now?

I will read dialogue worth reading. I like having a story to follow. But we’ve barely loaded in and already I’m refusing to read another paragraph. I don’t know these people. I don’t care about them yet. Let us do something.

And I refuse to invest my time in something that reads like nobody bothered to look it over. Someone needed to cut this shit down.

Oh good, that voice

Then we encountered our first NPC out in the world, and the AI voice started. That overused “epic old man” delivery that immediately screams ElevenLabs to me.

Sigh.

I am so tired of hearing this voice. It’s already everywhere, and now it’s in the game I’m trying to play with my cousin. Reading more of this dialogue at us.

The developer confirms temporary AI voices for two vendors. Two? I thought I heard more, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out.

They also say the dialogue is human-written. I don’t buy it. It reads like AI slop through and through. Whoever “wrote it” needs to PROOFREAD IT.

How do you listen to this much dialogue in that voice and decide, yep, keep it all?

We’re right here. Hit us.

Meanwhile, we were spamming attack at zombies that couldn’t path to us from inches away.

Right in front of our faces.

We could hit them. They couldn’t figure out how to reach us. So we’re just standing there clicking, and this AI man is STILL TALKING in the background.

It was fucking ridiculous.

One of the worst combat experiences I’ve had in a while, made even more irritating by the fact that I couldn’t get away from the dialogue. I wanted to give the actual gameplay a chance after all that reading, and this was what we got.

Quit. Uninstall.

We were done.

Other people aren’t exactly selling me on it

Looking at other reviews afterward didn’t inspire confidence.

Another player describes poor hit feedback in both melee and ranged combat, frustrating looting, and unnecessarily awkward interactions. They also describe attacking a human NPC with an axe, getting completely ignored, and somehow ending up trading with him.

lol. OK.

The same review reports zombies teleporting onto cars when they touch them and waypoints disappearing after the player went back for their dropped items.

We didn’t encounter those particular bugs. We had already quit. I’m including them because I went looking to see what other people were experiencing, and apparently there was plenty more waiting for us.

Oh, and it’s another Synty asset game

Then I looked at Synty’s POLYGON Apocalypse pack. Oh for fuck’s sake. Of course.

And this part is confirmed. In a Steam reply about the resemblance to SurrounDead, the developer says they’re “using some of the same Synty assets.” So yes, it’s another game using that same store-bought art. And “some” =’s ALL! ALL!

Look at the examples below. These are Synty’s own promotional images for the Apocalypse pack, showing its survivor characters and quarantine settlement pieces. They’re examples of what’s sold in the pack, rather than a verified list of every asset used in Never Be Alone.

And before this turns into a debate about whether developers are allowed to buy assets, yes. Obviously. That’s what the store is for. That isn’t why we uninstalled.

It’s that we got the familiar store assets, AI voices, paragraphs of erroneous generated text slop, and combat that barely worked in front of us. All together. I’m already sick of the dialogue, then the voice starts, then the zombies can’t reach us. Finding the asset pack afterward just made me more annoyed.

If you’re buying the art and using AI for the voices, then the actual game needs to give me a reason to stay. Ours couldn’t get us through ten minutes. That’s why I’m calling it slop. I don’t care how many pieces you’ve managed to put together if playing the thing is this fucking irritating.

Yes, ten minutes

I’m not playing another two hours of something I hate so someone in the comments can decide I’ve earned an opinion.

We lasted about ten minutes. That’s how bad the opening was for us.

A demo is supposed to make me want the full game. This one made me uninstall.

I know it’s a demo. I expect bugs. I’ve played plenty of janky games with my cousin and had a great time. But here I’m already irritated by the text, then the AI voice starts, and when we finally hit something, the combat sucks too.

What am I staying for?

And the AI part bothers me because this is exactly what I hate seeing people do with it. You can generate as much text as you want. Somebody still has to read the fucking thing and decide whether it’s any good. Somebody has to listen to the voice and consider whether players will want to hear it for more than thirty seconds.

It doesn’t feel like enough of that happened here.

Making game development accessible to everyone doesn’t mean everyone knows how to develop something worth playing. The tools can help you make it. You still need to give a shit about what comes out.

This felt like relying on the output and expecting us to sit through it.

AND THAT MATTERS lol.

Not recommended. My cousin and I wanted to kill some zombies together. It should not have been this annoying.