Jason Rohrer's multiplayer life sim One Hour One Life arrives on Steam

The intriguing One Hour One Life is half multiplayer survival game, half social experiment—and now it's all available on Steam. Previously, you could only buy it direct from creator Jason Rohrer, who you might know from The Castle Doctrine.

I played it alongside Rohrer in February and thought it had plenty of potential. You spawn as the child of another player, and have exactly one hour—a full life cycle—to make your mark on the world. For the first few minutes, you're entirely reliant on your in-game mother. After that, you'll be crafting, hunting, and building, and then when it's all over you'll respawn as a baby again, this time to a different parent and potentially in a different part of its huge world.

The idea is that, over time, players collaborate and build towns, monuments, and work up the tech tree together, from crude wooden tools through to solid houses. Rohrer is constantly adding new items and the plan is that, eventually, players will make it up to more modern technology, like vehicles with combustion engines.

The move to Steam is an interesting one, partly because Rohrer is a developer that likes to go it alone—he's only ever put 2 of his 20-odd games on Steam before. He was one of the many developers I spoke to for a discussion about whether selling indie games through Steam is worth it or not.

One Hour One Life costs $20/£15.49 on Steam, or it's also available direct through its website, where you'll find detailed stats about what players are building and just how far back some generations of in-game families go. Reviews on Steam are positive so far, and it might be worth checking out.

Thanks, RPS.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.