Another Life has a great start, but it just slows down to a crawl and there's parts of it that really don't work for me. Everything to do with Second Reality just has that vibe of people who don't understand online culture trying to write about it, seriously, an in game item that reveals the real names and emails of people you look at in game, that's an extreme privacy violation. Also while I can believe Tosh using alien tech to make things more high-res for Owen, no way would it work for other people who use an an item Owen owns.

There is some really great character stuff in there, especially towards the start. The chapters from the Alien's POV give great insight into how it works and what it's thinking which I really love, and there's a great moment at the beginning where Owen is getting at Gwen for caring about people who die.... but it all falls flat later.

For a story that's meant to be focusing more on Owen, the elements you learn about his backstory don't quite gel with what you see on the TV show. To be fair, my main problem is with the idea that Owen was always like how he is now, running from a relationship because he didn't want to commit, which isn't the fault of the story because it was written pre-fragments when you see more of him pre-Torchwood, but it's an element that doesn't really work now. We also don't get enough time with him at all after Megan's death, which is a real shame given how much focus she's given in the story.

The ending also felt a little weaker for me with the use of Second Reality to stop Owen, and Jack's immortality stopping the alien (somehow?) (it's not really clear why the alien couldn't just stay in his body as he comes back?).

But overall, there was enough enjoyable here for me to give this a 5/10, I like a lot of the character stuff, and the mystery is pretty fun, but yeah, overall mostly 'meh'