Alter Evo is a surrealist cyberpunk horror game, set in a vaguely Ergo Proxy coded dystopia. You play a guy named Evo, an unemployed programmer in a drab settlement named North Terrace. One day, Evo's therapist puts him onto a dating app, distributed by the government, meant to set him up with his scientifically optimal partner. That person turns out to be wealthy heiress Brunilda, who also happens to be the creator of an indie game that, for some reason, puts her in the crosshairs of an evil transhumanist alien cult. Or something like that.
It's a game that straddles the line between "experimental" and "sophomoric" and heavily leans on the latter side. Mechanically, there are three primary modes to its gameplay. You drive between points of interest in your hover car, avoiding enemies and picking up text logs on a barren world map, where sensible physics and collision mapping are treated as more of a suggestion. You interact with objects and people and solve puzzles at a variety of locations that include Evo's apartment, a hospital and Brunilda's mansion, among others. And you fight your way through a couple of designated dungeons, which is where Project Evo turns into a very simplistic third person shooter. You get a handgun, a submachine gun and a hand cannon, plus a baton for your melee weapon, and you get to shoot them at a small variety of cyborgs that, for the most part, can't do much more than run at you. While PE is a horror game, it's very decidedly not a survival horror game, ammo is so plentiful it's almost impossible to run out.
You might say Project Evo is a story driven game. You might also say, it could very easily be a walking simulator and would most likely be better for it. Now, as to what that story is, I'm not exactly sure. At the start, it feels very much like "The writers barely disguised grievances", about the job market, dating, social alienation and so on, which, you see, I find slightly less tolerable than the writers barely disguised fetishes, on account that even when I share them, I don't get much out of seeing them on screen. As soon as Brunilda is introduced, though, it unravels into a confusing mess of corporate conspiracies, home invasions, star crossed love, surreal hallucinations and weird, quirky anime-isms (this game prominently features a talking robot fox) that, despite my best efforts, I couldn't really make heads or tails of.
There's a part of me that wants to say it's a bit like Signalis, if it was about straight angst, rather than gay angst. And not remotely as good. But no, what it much rather reminds me of are some old Source mods like G.String or Underhell that didn't have a budget, didn't have any professional experience of how to make a game but, god knows, they had a vision. And that vision is genuinely interesting, even in a rather unrefined state. Alter Evo is certainly a B-Movie game. Between the protagonists ridiculous Solid Snake voice, the cheesy jump scares, the awkward animations and the absolutely inscrutable plot and world building that feel like Tommy Wiseau paying homage to Philip K. ♥♥♥♥, it could never for a moment be confused for a professional production. But, make no mistake, there are plenty of moments when its whole weird teenage chuuni cybergoth vibe coalesces into something genuinely original and even, kind of, compelling.
Now, I have finished the game, but I haven't 100 percented it. There are some rather esoteric optional puzzles in it and it's not like anyone's played this, so there aren't any guides I could look up. Maybe if I had been able to solve those, I'd understand what the hell this game was actually about. But after a regular playthrough... well, Project Evo isn't exactly a good game. But there's a certain creative spark there, it's so confidently and genuinely weird, that I kind of want to support the people who made it, just because I'm curious what else they're capable of. So, I don't want to recommend this, exactly, but I want to raise awareness of it, at least.
