Stayin' Alive Demo

One of the downsides of getting old is that your body stops functioning at peak capacity, which makes it difficult to enjoy the things that make you happy. This is obviously not always the case, and you can get used to most things after a while. It’s harder to stay positive when you are in a retirement home and you are in pain, on the other hand, so it’s not difficult to understand people who are looking for some kind of escape.

Stayin' Alive is a very interesting multiplayer action game in which you can play the role of a senior trying to end his life by any means necessary. Not only that, but it’s also possible to be a nurse and stop other patients from killing themselves, which is about as fun as it sounds. The gameplay mechanics are fairly simple, but they do require a bit of getting used to before you are able to get the hang of it.   In essence, the residents have to use everything they can find around the retirement home in order to commit suicide, which involves setting themselves on fire, cutting off their respirator cord, or many other improvised methods of suicide. However, they are confined to a wheelchair, so things are slightly more difficult to achieve than you might think at first.

On the other hand, the nurses also have to find the right objects in order to prevent the sudden surge of suicides. You can carry two objects at once, one in each hand, but they need to be the right ones in order to prevent suicide attempts. Sedatives are useful in any situation, on the other hand, at least if the patient is not on fire. The nurse’s ultimate goal is to sedate the old-timers and take them to a containment room.   Up to eight players can play at the same time, depending on the map, and it’s obviously a lot more fun when you have to deal with multiple suicide cases. Speaking of which, the maps are not particularly pretty, but they are detailed, and they don’t get in the way of your fun. The controls require more work as well, but then again the game is still in early access at this point.

In the end, Stayin' Alive might be a bit morbid for some, but the fun factor is definitely there. Hence, it’s nice to see some new ideas in the genre, and you can have a lot of fun in multiplayer if you find a populated server, which is another problem right now.