AlternativA is a point and click cyberpunk game that came out a decade before Cyberpunk 2077 propelled the genre to global fame. Set in a dystopian 2045 Prague, the city has survived the third world war caused by the invention of android robots and has restructured itself into three districts (Government, Industrial and Slums) separated by walls, with a high-level railway network connecting them that requires identification in the form of a travel pass with a limited charge, and power is now consolidated between three entities: the State; Endora, a construction conglomerate; and Theolex, the manufacturer of androids.
You play as Richard Rocek, a commuter and construction worker raised by his foster father and bartender Tom, who lives in the Slums district with his roommate and coworker Andy, and Richard starts the game being evicted from the Industry district due to Endora’s mass layoff and has his access card to the district revoked by the android guardians. This also includes his right to use the city’s metro network, forcing him, now unemployed, to walk all the way back to his apartment. Unwilling to do so, you start the game trying to figure out how Richard can illegally recharge his metro card – it requires a substance applied onto the card itself which is dispensed by the terminals.
The game uses a simple 3 option system where objects you click on can be either observed (magnifying glass symbol), talked to, or interacted with (hand symbol), and items in the inventory can be used on objects in the world, with Richard reacting with some dialogue to let you know whenever something you are asking him to do is impossible or wouldn’t make any sense.
The game, unfortunately, is often not intuitive at all, and you find yourself alt tabbing out of it to consult the walkthrough guide to see what to do next. The dialogue in the game is also not meant to be a moment to relax and immerse yourself in the world, but rather, you have to pay attention to almost every sentence that is spoken because it contains clues on what to do or which location to visit next, including which items in your inventory you have to combine with another to get a new item.
Right clicking on any item in your inventory shows you a narrated description in your PDA, and speaking of, your PDA (they were the latest fad and considered futuristic gizmos back in the late 2000s when this game was being developed) gives you info on the world and what your next task is. Counter-intuitively, you often have to backtrack to previously visited locations to progress the story, or fetch something that you require in a different part of the map. Thankfully, a double click makes Richard run and double clicking on the entrance/exit area of a location quickly swaps locations without making you wait till Richard walks all the way across the scene.
The game never got remastered, but thankfully runs even on modern hardware more than 15 years later without any initial technical difficulties (although I did experience a freeze once where an ai character’s movement animation happened but he didn’t move forward in the scene, and your controls were frozen until he got to his designated spot, and this sometimes also happens to Richard where he ends up moonwalking on the spot; a solution was to either keep double clicking to make him run, or alt-tab and then jump back into the game to help him move forward and reach his destination, as he has to be standing in a certain spot to interact with an object).
The game was designed to be played on those old 4:3 aspect ratio CRT monitors which had resolutions of like 1200x800, and the highest resolution this game supports seems to be a 4:3 equivalent of 1080p, which would be 1440x1080 instead of 1920x1080, and therefore has black bars on either side at all times, as each location/background has artistically only been pre-rendered for the 4:3 format (the mouse however can go past the black borders). The alternative (no pun intended) would be to select 4:3 aspect ratio in the game options (which are called “wits” for some reason, just like a save is called a "chance"), which however stretches the 4:3 across your entire widescreen, making everything look stretched. The few pre-rendered cutscenes this game has do work in widescreen format, but for some strange reason, mysterious black letterboxes appear on the top and bottom without going all the way from left to right, only cutting off some of the visuals, which I also found annoying. I assume they'd make sense if their goal was to turn a 4:3 format into a quasi-widescreen-format for the widescreen cutscenes, originally meant to be played *inside* that 4:3 screenspace, to do so.
If you want to force a higher resolution, you can’t even do it by writing a new value in the game’s .ini file, but have to directly modify the hexadecimal value in your registry. Yeah, not messing with my registry values. The only other alternative would be to use DgVoodoo, copy the dll files over to the game's installation directory and then launch DgVoodoo and change the resolution there, but I have no experience with that either.
Interestingly, the game supports surround sound, as I could hear the ambient music in my rear speakers and the dialogue was played from the center speaker.
The game does not have an autosave function, so you have to save manually, and considering the game will occasionally crash, for example when some moving object doesn’t load properly, either your controls will be frozen, or backing out of the location results in a black screen.
The dialogue in the game is monotonous, the main character is irritated all the time, and some voice actors sounded like they were reading off a script. Really, the only thing this game has got going for it are the visuals. Everything else feels clunky and as if it were programmed by a two man team of comp sci undergrads in an old soviet basement. Don’t waste your time with this chore of a game. Even back in 2010 this was considered a low effort indie title. I tried to give this game a chance (no pun intended) I really did, but it just felt like running from A to B between all interactable objects figuring out how to progress next and some of these puzzles are deliberately built around permutation, resulting in frustration due to many trial and errors, and, i guess, that great feeling of joy when you do manage to crack the combination. Other times, items are hidden in plain sight and the scene becomes a "where's waldo" type of thing, like finding an access card amidst a heap of garbage, or a pair of socks in a room one at a time. The final leg of the game isn't even cyberpunkish, but turns into some tropico or farcry 6 type of point and click where some locations that felt rushed, didnt even have ambient sounds and all you could hear was your character's voice lines amidst silence (could have been another bug, as on someone else's walkthrough on ytube I could hear the ambient music playing). So if you want a steampunk point and click game that actually maintains a good story and soundtrack from start till finish, play Syberia instead.
