
Though up until now you have started from the beginning, you can pick which stage of life to jump to. You start over on the female version of the game, after an accidental disk swap has shown that you are not confined to the one you nominally started in. You learn that its framework is strong enough to have gone on to directly support its own section of modern interactive fiction. You haven’t even got onto a good proportion of the game and are slightly in awe at the scope of it and how well it still works given that. The way that so many of the scenarios are about such minor matters and can peter out to nothing, but it’s never clear when something more significant will leap out, gives the whole thing a rather lifelike feeling to its rhythm. The reviews at the end of each life section do not ring completely true but nonetheless suggest satisfying cumulative consequences to choices. Alter Ego is more complicated than either, of course, with its interactivity allowing for a lot of variables in play. You failed to take the hints that there was at least as much Choose Your Own Adventure as The Game of Life in there, and were punished accordingly. You do not make it further, as you fail to choose to run away fast enough from a stranger in a car, and your alter ego is abducted and killed. You get informed after a fridge investigation scenario that the wrong choices could have led to death by poisoning. You click your way through a lot more scenarios, from the serious to the amusing, from the mundane to the slightly less mundane. The psychology elements work a little better. They make it difficult for you to enjoy the comedy. As a new parent you have been aware at all times of your child’s personhood but have tried hard to avoid exactly this tendency, acutely aware of its heartbreaking implications. You recognise the tendency to present babies as fully formed adult minds trapped in the body and perception of a newborn. These make play out of uncomprehending descriptions of a dog as a ‘furry man’ and similar, but soon get onto stuff like saving up saliva to drool on people in revenge for unwanted attention. You are taken on to a bunch of questions from the perspective of a baby. It asks if you would like to take a little more time before coming out.Īction: HESITATE AND PICK TO COME OUT PEACEFULLY NOW Your first scenario tells you that you are in a warm, dark, comfortable place and it’s almost time to enter a different world.

You are playing this game as a new parent to a baby born prematurely. You get a pretty familiar outline of your characteristics. The personality test pretty much resembles the kind of thing you get at work a lot, with a couple of extra meta ones like asking if you will answer honestly and if you think these questions are a waste of time. After a first choice of picking the male version of the game rather than the female one, you are initially greeted with a set of questions to determine your alter ego’s personality. Your responses are generally requested in the form picking a mood and action from lists.

#Alter ego game play series#
You are, for the purposes of your games blog, about to play 1986 life simulator Alter Ego, which takes you slowly through an entire life via a series of short text scenarios with multiple choices. I want this game to succeed, but I don’t see it doing so if it’s this repetitive.Īs for the positives, the intercut dream scenes are lovable, even if they’re few and far between.Alter Ego (Activision, Commodore 64, 1986)

On the other hand, if it remains as it has been so far, it’ll feel like the £6.99 or whatnot really wasn’t worth it as the game would be about 80% filler content of a tapping simulator (not the good kind like the original game). If it’s too soon and there’s not as much of this reading as it seems, then i’m sorry and i’m sure i’ll find out soon (as I intend to play some more). I do like the art style and I loved the original Alter Ego, buying this game primarily to see Es’ side of the story and to support the developers for the great experience I had. Then there was a decent mini-game and now it’s back to the same reading thing again. I’ll admit, i’ve only played around 20 minutes so far, but the intro involved three books, each of which took around 5 minutes, but they were extremely repetitive.
