One Hour One Life is a multiplayer game created by Jason Rohrer, in which you start as a helpless child and eventually become elderly. The goal is to advance through the tech tree to rebuild civilisation over many generations and make sure that your future generations and town can survive. It was originally released in 2018, with near-weekly updates since.
Official Website here
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One Hour One Life contains examples of:
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Tropes A To F
- Abusive Parents: You can kill, starve or outright abandon your child.
- Aerith and Bob: The names on the name list range from Star and Lazer to more mundane names such as Bob and Ann.
- After the End: The cross-generational goal is to rebuild civilisation. This also happens when an apocalypse is triggered by a cross-generational, easily stoppable ritual.
- All Deserts Have Cacti: Barrel cacti spawn in deserts naturally and provide cactus fruit.
- Anti-Frustration Feature: The crafting hint system displays markers as to where items needed for the next crafting step is. You get a notification every time a child related to you is born and can find experts by holding an unlearned tool.
- Art-Style Dissonance
- Automaton Horses: Horses only need a carrot to be tamed. After that they can move at one constant speed without needing food or rest.
- Awesome, but Impractical: ars and planes. While they are a fast method of travel, they use up kerosene, an essential resource to get water late-game.
- Bamboo Technology: Bootstrapping a Newcomen engine, which kickstarts the industrial age.
- Battle Trophy:
- Bears and wolves can be skinned for their fur, used to make carpets and hats respectively.
- Players drop their stuff upon dying, so it is common for players to get spoils off of a thwarted raiding party or a successful takeover of a village.
- Bears Are Bad News - The most dangerous wild enemy in the game is the bear, which takes 3 shots from a bow and arrow to kill.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction - if you are born as a girl you can have kids at any time from 14 until 40 with no warning and no male character involved.
- Boring, but Practical: Subsisting on pie. Pies are very good foods, restoring a lot of hunger, and are easy to make with byproducts of the composting process, which is essential to town life.
- Dead Character Walking: Any player who is injured without access to healing. You get around 1 minute to get your affairs in order or say any last words before you die.
- Death of a Child: Any character, even if they've just been born, can die. Invoked with SIDS, a game mechanic allowing penalty-free escape from a life you dislike.
- Developer's Foresight: The naming system uses a preset list of names to prevent silly or demeaning names.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Being Eve for many players. Although being one is considered one of the hardest lives, if you pull it off you get to see your family name flourish, with the added boon of being able to be born back into it!
- Disc-One Nuke: Weaponry, without healing present in town. Bows and arrows, in particular, can be made within a life.
- Early Game Hell: Eve (first generation) camps are considered some of the hardest lives to pull off as you juggle laying the foundations for future generations, taking care of children and finding food after randomly spawning someplace in the wild.
- Easter Egg: At the centre of the map you may find a shrine which reads "UNLESS". This is a reference to a prominent player in the game, Tarr.
- Endless Game: One Hour One life has no 'objective' beyond seeing how long your family can survive.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin - It's a game where you get one hour in each life.
- Explosive Breeder: Mouflon/unshorn sheep, boars/pigs, bison. They produce baby versions of themselves (or their domestic variant) at random intervals. However, if you don't feed the babies, they die.
- Fishing for Sole: it is possible to fish up old boots from ice holes.
- Flat World: No mountains or features of water exist apart from ponds and springs.
Tropes G To L
- Good Parents: What players are supposed to be and encouraged to be. A good way to cement yourself as this is to teach children who are new to the game.
- Guide Dang It!: The recipes in game involve many steps - this game has a very steep learning curve. Notable examples include the diesel engine and the newcomen attachments.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Any example of a griefer being killed by the same bear they summoned.
Tropes M To R
- Oh, Crap!: Finding out that you don't have any fertile girls left, or that you've run out of a key resource like water or iron. Also seen in the emote your character plays when targetted for a kill by someone (or even many someones)
- Parental Abandonment: Common if parents can't feed their kids.
- Permadeath: Once you die, you can only start a new life. The only way to return to where you were is to be born to the same family again or to stumble upon your old town.
- Proportional Aging: The characters have a life expectancy of only 60 years, so they age faster than a normal human. A 14-year-old character is considered young adult, a 25-year-old character is considered a middle-aged man, and a 40-year-old character is considered an old man.
Tropes S To Z
- Schmuck Bait: Clicking a bear cave twice. Clicking once provides a low growling sound and twice unleashes a bear.
- Video Game Caring Potential: The whole game runs on this trope. Every new player is reliant on an unknown mother to get them through infancy.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can abandon your children, lure wild animals into the town, stab people you find alone and kill all the sheep.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you grief you may find yourself killed by other players very quickly. There's also the curse system, which prevents you from being born to players you curse for a preset time. Anger enough people and you'll quickly find yourself playing exclusively with other griefers. There's also the genetic score, which is more of a reward for keeping your family alive, however it ties into things such as hunger levels as you get older, so it actively disadvantages those who don't play nice.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: The OHOL world is several times larger than Earth.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: The hunger bar. It drains at different rates and has different capacities depending on your age and environment.
