Alt-Frequencies

[h1][i]Don't Listen to the Radio, Hear Something That You 'Ready Know I Got no Radio...[/i][/h1] [b]Key features[/b] [list] [*]Doesn't feel like a game, [*]Simple controls and relaxed gameplay [/list] [b]Exam prep, anyone?[/b] Well. Alt-Frequencies feels more like a listening exam. You get few radio channels with various topics, discussions, conversations, from which you then pluck selected paragraphs and insert them into other channels. Someone wants questions? Listen, find, "copy/paste". https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3655785817 Weirdly reminds me those hateful "true/false/not given" moments, when providing a podcaster with a fitting phrase turns out to be irrelevant. 'kay.

You are faced with the image of a radio on a desk/table with the options to adjust the frequency to different stations, record sound bites, play them back for yourself to listen to, and the option to upload them to the current broadcast to interrupt it with some signal or message. In doing so, you are attempting to unravel some flaky time-travel based government conspiracy. [b][u]-Positives-[/u][/b] The music is pretty good (not my cuppa, but it's catchy), the dialogue is fairly decent, and the voice acting is largely excellent (yeah, there's a few less than stellar actors, but it's mostly solid). The gameplay setup is intuitive and easy to grasp. Unfortunately, that's not enough to make the game fun.... [b][u]-Negatives-[/u][/b] The gameplay relies on you intuiting which sound clips are pertinent to the current situation and somehow figuring out which portion of which station's broadcast you should upload the sound bite to in order to progress the plot. The problem is that there simply aren't enough context clues to figure out many of the puzzles in most of the chapters (some are easy to figure out, but most.......yeeesh....), so you will find yourself brute forcing the puzzles by grabbing broadcast segments [i]you[/i] think are pertinent and then uploading them to the djs/newscasters/college students that you think will pick up what you're laying down and provide more information and/or progress the plot. It results in a game that doesn't respect your time and makes you more or less randomly guess what the heck the game designers were thinking. As an example, during the first chapter you will figure out that you need to snatch a buried code hidden in a broadcast (the clues for this are actually decent, and it shouldn't require too much head-scratching to get to that point) and then switch over to some strange pirate station that is broadcasting random noises/sound-effects, such as a baby crying, a bottle breaking, etc, and download one to your machine and decipher it. Now there's a fair number of those sound effects on display, and ZERO clues as to which one it is, so you literally have to record and re-listen to EACH one in turn before blindly stumbling on the correct one. That's not a puzzle, because there's no way to intuit that it's actually the brick being dropped sound effect that contains the buried sound code (there's no part in any of the broadcasts that hints at something hard smashing, or any bloody clue whatsoever). It's just an exercise in frustration as you listen to and record each sound in order until you get the right one. As I said, it doesn't respect the player's time and the game rapidly becomes unfun as you try sound bite after sound bite, inserted into one station broadcast segment after another in the hopes that you've guessed (remember almost no context clues, AT ALL) correctly. This doesn't apply to ALL of the game (the last chapter for example has some very logical solutions to progress the plot to its conclusion) but it sure applies to enough of it to make it rather un-fun. Sadly (because the rest of the presentation {writing, music, etc} is damned solid) I cannot recommend a game that doesn't respect the player's time and substitutes brute-force, random guess "puzzling" for actual conundrums that can be logically solved.