Alter Ego

One of my favorite games, I started playing expecting anything and ended up with one of the games that left a big mark on me. the atmosphere is incredible and the story is engaging. The only bad part is when it ends. the story was not complete in this first game.

After completing the game, I have mixed feelings about it. It starts off strong, but as the story progresses, it seems to lose its direction. The narrative is trying to merge two different storylines, resulting in a scattered and somewhat confusing plot. The middle part of the game becomes somewhat dull, only to pick up again towards the end. Unfortunately, the ending, while unexpected, feels anticlimactic.

One standout aspect of the game is the use of pre-rendered backgrounds, which provide a visually stunning and immersive experience, Another aspect is that the game offers a lengthy playtime, taking 20-plus hours to complete.

6/10

Recommendation: Only buy it if its on sale.

Really liked the game, especially the style of the graphics. The puzzles at times were a bit confusing, but the hot spots helped in those cases. The voice acting for the main character was terrible tho and the dialog at times was laughable, but other than that, I had fun with the game and the story kept me guessing till the end.

It strung me along, hoping it would ending up being something good. It was not.
There is nothing supernatural in this game. Despite vampire leanings and even ghostly whispers in some areas, all just a red herring.
It's only so bad because it showed potential to be good, or at least alright. It's graphics are great. Sound, voice acting, music, all great. Emily, great. I'm pretty sure I got this game in a bundle, at least I hope I didn't spend full price on this because, now, I feel sorry that I played it.
There's odd jumps in the story, as if there was supposed to be game play there, but they just ended up lacking time to put it in. The dialog is odd in parts. The puzzles don't always make sense. Unnecessary backtracking. The story is so slow to build. You think, "Oh, there has to be more with this later." There isn't. Things that seemed important and relevant to the story actually aren't (the medallion, the chest in the office, etc). The two people you play as aren't very likable, and the moment you start to possibly feel any sort of empathy for them, and the story actually picks up little, it's over. Seriously, I got the ending cut scenes and was ready for more game play, because it didn't feel like it was supposed to be over, that it was supposed to go to another part of the story, but nope. It goes for a "dark and tragic" ending that I'm sure was supposed to stir some emotion. I doubt it was supposed to be annoyance, but that's what it ended up being. "A story you will NEVER FORGET!" I really hope I do.

Classic point and click adventure with good graphics. Mostly logical puzzles with a few obscure.
Overall I really enjoyed playing this game

This is a good point-and-click adventure game with some nice visual settings and the voice work is well done. The game suffers from a poor ending though. If you like adventure/mystery games, then Alter Ego is worth a try.

A perfect little point and click game.
The story is seen from different perspectives.
You must solve the mystery!
Pleasant scenery and atmosphere.
The game is simply warm and cosy.
Snug as a bug in a rug. That's how I felt playing.

An amazing and unique game. Kept me completely captivated from beginning to end. Although it had a dark atmosphere, it only added to the quality of the game. Well Done. I highly recommend this one. Well worth the money.

This had a lot of promoise, the story and atmosphere were very rich and engaging but the game was ultimately too easy, too short, and completely unsatisfying. If you like point and clicks maybe pick this one up on sale, but it just feels incomplete and broken.

The game follows the lines of Black Mirror and other point and click games, following the same art style of 2.5d graphics, the game had a pretty good story, having you start out playing a turn of the century down of his luck guy, your thrust into a good story of murder and crime. It's all shades of gray, you are not a upstanding person per say, your not someone you want to hate and come to like who you are playing as time goes on, and without going into detail, you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The game starts out slow but picks up. The puzzles and events make sense, and you won't be wondering why you solve the puzzles as in some games. I found the voice acting needs a bit of work but fits in the time that it takes place and the sound effects and artwork are well done. It's a shame that more people don't play it, and is left off people's game list, because it's actually a good story.

A very good adventure game with great story and unusual ending.

+atmospheric moody graphics
+good music holding tense
+strongly outlined characters
+not-naive story

-not always so intuinive, i got stucked few times
-sometimes boring - you have to go from person to person few times to get something

Overall: 8/10 - one of the best adventures games that i have played.

I just finished this game and although I had a good time playing it, the ending ruined it for me. If there was a sequel, it would be fine; alas there is not. There is a decent story, although towards the end it becomes overly complicated and the mystery is never really solved, or explained. Again, it seems as if a sequel was intended but it just didn't happen. That's really too bad, as there is no story resolution with this single game. After playing all three of the Black Mirror series, I understand how a cliffhanger at the end can be fun... as long as the story continues. I cannot fault the game itself for this, as my understanding is that the studio was closed before that was possible, so I have to give this game a thumbs up, but with the caution that you can't expect a complete story. If you can write your own ending, then go for it. If not, wait for a huge sale.

Alter Ego seems like a decent point & click adventure where you play two different characters that ultimately cross paths. The dialog ends up being quite dry and slow ending up making the game quite boring. I honestly fell asleep in my chair playing this game on at least 2 occasions. It's got a Sherlock Holmes detective vibe to it which kept it mildly interesting, but reaching the end just left me completely baffled. It's like they didn't have the time, resources, or money to finish the game so they just make an executive decision to end it prematurely. I'm still left with a bad taste in my mouth. Seriously, that's it?

As an interesting and somewhat successful adventure game, Alter Ego is the last video game made by Czech developer team, Future Games which we were familiar from the first game in The Black Mirror series. The studio was closed in 2011 due to financial problems after the release of this last game - which was also the probable underlying reason behind the abrupt ending we have here.

19th century, Plymouth. The city is shaken with the untimely death of Sir William, a deformed young noble with a handful of speculations running about his nature in the newspapers. At the time his funeral is being arranged, the swindler and street rat Timothy Moor comes to the city on a cargo carrier as a stowaway, apprehended by sailors. He manages to escape to find his childhood friend Brian for a job, only to find himself in an uncanny intrigue concerning Sir William himself. Following Tim's misfortune, Detective Briscol - who has just started his first day on the job, investigating a disturbance in the cemetery just after the funeral - becomes a part of the same uncanny intrigue as well. As the story progresses, our unlikely heroes will cross paths to try and shed some light into the dreadful business.

Spoilers for the following paragraph! Firstly, the storyline - being interesting enough during the game - closes up with a dark and unsatisfactory ending; leaving many loose ends which results with the unnecessary demise of our heroes. It is wrapped and misconcluded badly, with stupid mistakes on our "brilliant" main heroes' part. The last dialogue between our main heroes is misguiding and uncharacteristic, screaming out "we couldn't end the game as we intended to due to budget problems". The whole experience is as good as it lasts, but by the last 10 minutes of the game, you'll be disappointed if you'll be expecting an interesting conclusion.

Our main characters on the other hand, are intriguing and well written antiheroes rather than benevolent defenders of justice. They are successfully portrayed with their inner monologues displayed for the player, to reveal some truth to their nature aside their demeanor. They have severe character flaws, somewhat foul natures and an incredible amount of vanity; eventually resulting with their own downfall. Very humane and very well-done.

Graphics are made in AGDC, resulting in a successfully grim atmosphere with grayish colors dominating the century. Environment design is probably one of the upsides of the game, alongside an especially satisfactory voice acting with proper accents of the time. Character interactions and facial features are also appreciable. As an adventure game, Alter Ego is nothing extraordinary though. There are hardly any puzzles or actual item combinations. Items themselves are pretty obvious to encounter and gather too. As a mystery and crime investigation game though, it sure is noteworthy - especially the parts where we play as detective Bristol: gathering clues, interrogating witnesses and trying to guess the logic behind occurrences. The parts with Tim rely on story progression rather than mystery mainly and presents loose ends for detective Briscol eventually.

If you are to keep your expectations limited, Alter Ego is a nice experience with a really lame ending. It has some imaginative ideas, good character builds and a potentially interesting story if only it would be displayed a bit more elaborately. If you stumble upon it on a decent sale, why not?

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I love point & click adventures and I don't mind a mediocre one noew and again, but this ...
+ decent voice acting (even if the accents seem overdone at times)
- both characters are utterly unlikable and without depth. If you're going to have two characters, why make them both egoistical a***holes?
- PC/NPC actions and interactions not at all believable.
- slooow story. Maybe it picks up later, but 5 hours in it's just plain boring
- puzzles, what there is of them, don't make sense at all. The game is utterly linear, you can't even pick up items until you've progressed to exactly the right point. Good puzzles seem logical after the fact, if not before, here it's just one WTF moment after the other. Also, having solved them, you should feel some sense of achievement, but in this game the tasks are just too mundane for that.

I'm not at all sure if I'll be able to bring myself to finish this ... stay away.

Title: Alter Ego
Genre: Adventure
Developer: bitComposer Games
Publisher: Viva Media
Release Date: 3rd August 2010

TL;DR, Verdict

Not bad, very slow paced. Good for those who like the point and click adventure genres, not good for those starting out in it. I think it's too expensive for what it is. If it was cheaper, it would be probably more worth a recommend.

Pros

Detailed environments – lots of little things to look at
Voice acting is nice, Irish and English accents!

Cons

Really slow paced

Gameplay

“Can you climb, naked man?” A point and click puzzle game, your character starts by escaping from a prison via a sewage/flood system, looking remarkably clean, if a little naked and handcuffed. He's a thief accosted by English constables, in a time where racial tensions between the Irish and English are at an all time high. When he picks up objects, they mysteriously disappear into his pants, and some of the animations are very slow ... and the character does have a slight habit of over explaining his actions during a successful “puzzle”, which could get annoying after a while. Yes smash the lock. No need to go further into it.

The character has a habit of reminding himself he can't do things or that something happened, or thinking that people are simple and how he needs to manipulate them – attributing to his thief-like character of dubious morals. Who also really dislikes hard work. Or work that requires effort in general. He's not a nice guy for sure, though entertaining in the way he interacts with people. You'll either like him or hate his guts. He seems to try and get around the game with his silver tongue. The dialogue between him and the woman who helps him out at the start is a little unbelievable, it progresses too conveniently. The accents are nice to listen to, though the main character is a little flat toned. But hey! Irish accents. It's very dialogue heavy so you'll spend a lot of time talking with characters and going through each talk option.

The environments are well rendered, they're not amazing but thought and detail has gone into it, from dirty basins to rust and pots and pans and objects lying around everywhere, giving the appearance of a run down, shabby and poor area. It's dilapidated and grimy, the less glamorous side of the Victorian style era, and this same level of detail persists in each scene you go into.

The game itself is a little too slow paced for me, things take too long to interact with, so I fast start losing interest in the adventure, despite the good environment, potential intriguing plot and interesting voice actors with their own quirks.


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Alter Ego suffers severly from puzzles that don't serve the plot, but rather bladly carry you from one door to the next key, or whatnot. Picking-up a box from the lowest shelf? Let's turn it into a puzzle! Nothing is too trivial for this game. Many of the items needed to solve the puzzles can't be picked unless a very specific trigger has already occured. You know the key is behind the statue, you can look at the statue, but the character would refuse just taking the key. As for the difficulty, most puzzles are of medium-low difficulty, and just require knowing *when* the time is right to solve one specific puzzle. I had everything I needed to make a certain paste, but it took another 30 minutes of gameplay between 1. Knowing that you need the paste, and 2. knowing where the paste needs to be applied, before you could get *water* to do it. So this should give you an example for both the "complexity" and annoyance of the puzzles.

Also, both characters are boring, pompous, and are mainly annoying. They pretty much have the same narcissistic personality, it just happen that one is a cop and the other is a criminal.

The plot is decent, and the atmosphere is rather good. It is a real shame that none of the puzzles support them. Buy this only if less than $5, and even then.. meh.

I was eyeing this game for a long time, and when the price was only around $1.50 CD I snapped it up.

I was glad I had, as I really enjoyed the game, (I had no idea that it was by the same developers as Black Mirror!)

Many good reviews have been written so I will only say that it's really too bad about the ending.
It is most probable that they'd run out of money...
edited; Yes Gingergal I too prefered black mirror ! :)

A very good game with great graphic style. The gameplay based on the classic click'n'point interaction and almost all puzzles are inventory based. The voiceovers are all fine except Tim who sounds a bit... dull. Almost all his voiceovers are done in the same tone so it sounds a bit out of place at some points.

The game will be easy for any player that usually plays these type of games and you can easily finish it in 5-7 hours. The story is good - it starts slowly but it picks up later with all the murders. Even though I've read most of the reviews for this game, and even though they all gave it a pretty bad score - the game really is good.

However - the end of the game is really rushed. It does make sense, but the way it's presented is far from what it should be for this type of game. Also - you'll spend the last 30min of gameplay just going from location to location in a very speedy way because (i guess) devs ran out of time or money to make it interactive. The story at that point just rushes up till the point where the detective literally explains everything to you, what was really going on and who was behind the murders. The bad thing about it is that most of the info was never present in the game, or was mentioned very vaguely.

All in all - it's a good game and I recommend it to all adventure lovers

1/5

First and foremost I find the title of the game misleading. Just looking at the cover you would imagine the game follows some character who lives a double life; one as a good citizen, the other a darker kind of villain. I was expecting something along the lines of a Jekyll and Hyde game.

Instead you play as two independent characters one an Irish rascal, the other a straight-laced English policeman. The game doesn't involve any problem solving but more like going from one place to another clicking on different things, and figuring out what to do next. The story is enjoyable whilst you're playing it, it unravells nicely and keeps you gripped.

Nothing however can really compensate for how poor the ending is. It's not simply that the ending is an unhappy one for both protagonists but it renders the whole story pointless.

There is one stupid part where you have to steal the ledger from a shop associated with the villain. This involves:
1. Walking outside from the church
2. Walking outside the main gates
3. Walking from outside the main gates to outside the shop.
4. Click on the door.
And thats it. After you click on the door you're automatically sent back to the church after a brief monologue and tell you're partner "Here you go, I've got the account book" (not the exact wording, but that's basically what happens). Stupid, utterly stupid.

There are far better point and clicks out there. Find anohter.

Just finished this game. I'm a fan of slow point and click games and I must say, I really enjoyed its classic feel and realstic detective approach. most "gamers" wont like this game, but it offers a great story and enviroment, which is what I play games for. That ending sure was unsatisfying doe