ALTER EGO (2023)

An extremely short and free P&C adventure game, ALTER EGO was not something I regretted spending those 15 minutes on seeing as I picked it up on a whim. Reese the Rat stumbles upon the corpse of beloved Winona and gets imprisoned by the Judge becoming the primary suspect. What follows are three levels of very simple puzzles, but the real draw lies in the psychological exploration regarding Reese and Winona's relationship. Is everything truly the way it seems? I would point out the animated graphical novel cutscenes with their odd looping animations, though. This is not the sort of production level you'd expect from a free game and was greatly appreciated. Story itself is brief, but delivers the dramatic gut punch without the need to beat around the bush.

point and click, straightforward minigames, good storytelling and fun artstyle; I wish there was more to it.

Love the music and art style. The story is good too. Very gay 10/10

Alter Ego explores manipulation and domestic abuse through the lens of a victim feeling guilt over standing up for herself. The stressful act of self-defence manifests as a murder mystery for her to investigate. It's a novel idea that created an experience that I appreciated, and I quite liked some of the concepts it managed to get across with its short runtime, like seeing how the girlfriend quite literally paints herself as a saviour and uses that as an abusive tactic. There's also some great visuals, with the game's art heavily benefitting at times from a willingness to go off-model or switch up the style to create some unique and striking imagery. Unfortunately, even though I find quality in multiple elements of this title, I can't outright call it good with the 2 issues I had with it. The less impactful one, while still bothersome, were the game's looping scenes. I understand that they probably wanted to make it flow better than if it freeze-framed, but the lack of clarity regarding when a scene is finished caused me to both occasionally skip over dialogue with the feeling that it was ready to move on, and at other points slow the pace of progression down a bit too much just …

it's short and it's free! if you like heavy subject matter and metaphors, you don't have an excuse to avoid it

It's very short but absolutely worth playing. The visual style is incredible