One Leaves is a Survival Horror game released for Xbox One and Windows in 2019. It was developed by Wahoo Studios and published by Oath Inc.
You find yourself trapped in a freakish environment with three of your friends. An overhead voice informs you that only one of you is going to make it out, so you need to navigate through the maze and solve puzzles before it's too late. Along the way, you'll unwittingly encounter the harmful side effects of smoking tobacco.
If you haven't guessed, the entire game is essentially a Public Service Announcement sponsored by The Real Cost. The concept is taken from a statistic that three out of four teens who use tobacco will be unable to quit. It also serves as a companion piece to their ad campaign
with the same concept.
The game can be downloaded for free on the Microsoft Store.
Three out of four tropers will not escape these tropes:
- Abandoned Area: Your first destination is an abandoned high school. Once you're able to get to the elevator, you're off to an...
- Abandoned Hospital: The next place you end up in.
- A Winner Is You: If you manage to find the exit first, you'll walk into a sunny park before the game fades to white while the voice tells you that you were lucky... because your friends weren't. This is followed by a message that being stuck in that maze was like a hopeless smoking addiction.
- Based on a True Story: That's what the opening loading screen claims, though we're not sure if the true story involved a race in a hellish maze. Though it is just a metaphor for how only 1 out of 4 addicts manage to escape smoking.
- Early Game Hell: The puzzles actually get less confusing as you progress.
- Escape from the Crazy Place: The entire point of the game.
- Escape Sequence: Unless you get the bad ending...
- Excuse Plot: There's really not much in terms of story. You're stuck in the maze and you must escape before one of your friends do.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Averted. Despite the hellish environment, nothing is actually trying to kill you. All you need to worry about is getting out of the maze before your friends do.
- Fate Worse than Death: Getting trapped in the maze will entice this feeling.
- Featureless Protagonist: As this is a First Person game, you never see the body of who you're playing as.
- Multiple Endings: The game has two depending on if you make it to the end as fast as possible.
- Bittersweet Ending: You escape the maze, but the voice tells you that your friends will be stuck there forever and if you try again, the odds might not be in your favor.
- Downer Ending: If you take too long to find the exit, you're trapped in the maze forever with a morgue as your purgatory.
- In both cases, the voice will remind you of the harmful effect smoking will do to you.
- Personal Horror: The biggest thing to fear in the game is what cigarettes will do to your body.
- Public Service Announcement: What the entire game amounts to at the end.
- Rule of Scary: The game's plot doesn't make a lot of sense if you really think about it, but being trapped in a maze sure is unsettling.
- Run or Die: Again averted. The only way you can actually lose is if you don't make it out on time.
- Surreal Horror: You'll come across some bizarre rooms like an upside down classroom, a gym with a prop tree on fire, and even a gut-infested room with a pair of coughing lungs!
- Thwarted Escape: All your plans will end up like this if you take too long to find the exit.
- You Wake Up in a Cage: You start locked up a cage with three of your friends stuck in their own cages. Once the cage door opens, you need to get out of the maze now!
