ALTER EGO

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

a trama chama o interesse.

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 to make sure I won't miss anything. The biggest issue with this game is the runtime. At about 20 minutes max, Alter ego severely limits the room it has to dive into the complex and heavy themes it lays out. As stated before there were times where some subtlety and intrigue peek through, but a lot of it was also presented without much grace, leading to a sizable dose of expository dialogue that probably comes off as a bit more cheesy than it'd like to be at times due to its blatant simplicity. Not only does it take away from the detective mystery vibe it seemed to tease to you at first by often being so quick to feed you information, but there simply is not enough time to get invested in this narrative that accounts for pretty much the entire experience. I'd give it a recommendation, but not a very enthusiastic one.