In 6 days, every living cell on Earth will be dead.
You have one chance.
One Chance
is another in a long line of Apocalyptic Countdown
Flash games that are all the rage these days. Your team finds a cure for cancer that happens to be a
pathogen that travels through air. It uses a
Second Generation
style graphics scheme and the gameplay consists of walking forward and making a few simple choices.
To crib the author's notes:
"One Chance is a game about choices and dealing with them."
"Scientist John Pilgrim and his team have accidentally created a pathogen that is killing all living cells on Earth."
"In the last 6 remaining in-game days on Earth, the player must make choices about how to spend his last moments. Will he spend time with his family, work on a cure or go nuts?"
"You only have ONE CHANCE to save the world. One. Uno. 1. And you bastards will have to pry this game out of my cold dead hands before I put a replay feature in."
This game provides examples of:
- Apocalypse How: Planetary total extinction.
- Beard of Sorrow: While John had a beard before the effects of the pathogen occured, it's evolved into one of these by the end.
- Betty and Veronica: There's your wife, and a co-worker that keeps trying to skip work with you.
- Children Are Innocent
- Downer Ending: As with all multiple-ending games, there is always one bad ending. No matter which choices you make, every ending is a downer in one way or another.
- Even if you work every day and cure it, unless they find some animals and other plants around to cure, John and his daughter are going to die of starvation, because every living thing is dying.
- Other life recovering is irrelevant, you don't actually need to eat living things to derive nutrition from them.
- Driven to Suicide: Several people, mostly your coworkers. And your wife.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Barring some convoluted hacking, the game keeps track of your progress and only lets you play through one time: as in, no replays or restarts permitted.
- Failure Is the Only Option
- Final Death
- Golden Ending: Or, as close as you can get in a game like this anyway. If John works every day, he and his daughter survive.
- At least for the immediate future. If you try to start the game again after this, you see the park where the game ended restored to life... but no sign of them, leaving it ambiguous whether or not they starved before life could recover. On the other hand, they can't spend all of their time in the park... also, see above note on the Downer Ending entry.
- Heroic Mime
- Lost Forever: The last sentence of the author's description is not kidding around. While it's obviously possible to get around this, the save file does everything in its power to make it hard.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Barack Obama makes a handful of appearances.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Spend time with your family rather than trying to find a cure, and one of your co-workers, furious that you aren't trying to fix what you caused, murders your family and commits suicide.
- Sleep Cute: The context definitely isn't cute, however.
- Sole Surviving Scientist: The game is all about this - you play a scientist trying to fix an accidentally lethal cure for cancer as it slowly infects everyone in the world.
- Artistic License - Biology: A cure for cancer that is also apparently a virus that kills approximately everything ever? Okay, maybe. It's deployed by the government before they figure out if it's safe? Uh huh. It somehow replaces the entirety of Earth's atmosphere inside six days? Yeah, seems legit.
- As one comment on a YouTube video put it, "VIRUSES AND VACCINES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY."
- Your Days Are Numbered: The premise, though you can choose to try to fix it.
- Wham Line: Today, every living cell on Earth will be dead. You had one chance.