Alter Ego

I really love your game! It was the first one ever of its kind back then! I think you can revive! People will 100% like it since BitLife is super popular and uses a similar growing up theme! But this game has so much potential!! You could redesign it and keep a lot of the same stuff but make it more inclusive with race, gender, and sexuality! You could have more choices added that lead to different life’s and careers! And when the player dies you can make the children continue the game similar to BitLife! You could add more pictures and graphics for events/life choices to make it more user friendly! You could add more customization for characters and abilities that can be purchased! You could add more control or not, over other characters in the players life! And after this one gets updated overtime you could even create a whole new game similar concept and mechanics but a different theme like in medieval times! Or in the future! There’s many things that can be done to improve it and make it popular! Meanwhile I’ll continue to play the game!

Okay, so I’ve played this game about a dozen times. I’d say it’s less “addictive” than well written enough to give you room to explore different lives while retaining its replay value. It’s a solid game and I personally love a good life simulator like this one. One thing that stood out to me from the start was the lack of LGBT options. As a lesbian, this pulls me out of the gameplay experience every time. Do I choose an entire lifetime of male experiences in order to have a love life that includes women? Or do I choose a life of female experiences and accept that the entire romantic dimension of the game will center around men? More than once I’ve ended the game a spinster. I don’t think the game needs a “modern LGBT twist”. I think it would be vastly improved even if it remained nearly the same, but with options down the road to choose partners of different genders, choose pronouns, come out as a specific sexuality, change names, and options to come out as transgender (with the gameplay literally switching from “Male script” to “Female script”, or vice versa), with specific characters responding accordingly. Adding LGBT options just means more immersive gameplay for more people than you might think, and I feel it would vastly improve the game for players like me!

I’ve had this game on my devices since around 2011 and find myself still coming back to it seven years later, so it feels criminal to not leave a review. Basically, it’s a fantastic life sim with a *lot* of replayability, thanks to its RPG-like stats system and its huge branching stories. It’s almost entirely text-based, which is no problem at all since it’s so well written. The comedy scenes are hilariously cheesy (this is a port of a 1986 game, after all!), and it successfully builds on stories of relatable growing pains to deliver compelling scenarios for your alter ego to navigate. The childhood sections of the game feels bittersweet and nostalgic every time I go through them, and the older adult/elder sections hit hard and make me feel more empathy for real-life folks in their twilight years. Your character will face emotional yet realistic tribulations, like mental health crises and affairs and near-death experiences (or maybe just a horrible, crushing premature death). I could gush for ages about the unexpected engagement and entertainment this text-based adventure has given me all these years. I seriously recommend Alter Ego to anyone who likes the idea of everything I’ve talked about and thinks it sounds even slightly fun. I guarantee you it’s even better than that once you dip below the surface. It is worth every penny you’ll spend on it.