One Chance

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

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. It is not the feel-good flash game of the summer.

To crib the author's notes:

"One Chance is a game about choices and dealing with them.

"Scientist John Pilgrim and his team have accidently 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."

Tropes used in One Chance include:
  • Apocalypse How: We're facing Class 6 here.
  • 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.
  • Driven to Suicide: Several people, mostly your coworkers. And your wife.
  • 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.
  • Heroic Mime
  • It Got Worse
  • 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.
  • You Fail Biology Forever: 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.