Publisher: Viva Media
Developer: Future Games
System requirements: Windows XP SP2/Vista/Win 7, 2.5 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB graphics card, 3 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now

Used to be that all you needed to make an adventure game was a mystery story, some clever puzzles and detailed 2D backgrounds in which to hide important items. In recent times, this simple formula has given way to high-tech, 3D interactive fiction such as Heavy Rain and Alan Wake. Now Czech developer Future Games tries to tread the fine line between the two styles with Alter Ego, a gothic potboiler that’s long on exposition and short on puzzling.

October, 1894. Irish petty thief Timothy Moor is caught stowing away on a ship bound to Plymouth, England. Once back on dry land, he escapes by diving into the river. He emerges in the sewers and sneaks into a laundry, where he convinces a washerwoman to hide him until the police stop searching for him. Meanwhile, police Det. Sgt. Briscol arrives to take his first city posting after spending three years in the burbs. Even before he can get his official ID he’s called to the local cemetery, where the body of the infamous local serial killer, Sir William Lewis (aka “The White Beast”), has gone missing. The paths of Moor and Briscol eventually cross, and they become reluctant cohorts in a mystery that becomes more and more gruesome the deeper they look.

Getting around in Alter Ego is familiar to all point-and-click adventurers. The mouse cursor changes color when it passes over something that can be examined or added to inventory. Backgrounds are static, with exits that are indicated by a change in the shape of the cursor. Inventory items can be examined and/or used by holding the cursor at the bottom of the screen until the icons appear. To use an item, simply click on it, move it where you want it and click again. Conversations are managed using a dialogue tree; threads are blacked out when they’re completed. You can skip ahead of long discussions using the mouse buttons, but many of the conversations contain important information that you skip at your own peril.

The art style of Alter Ego is impressive. The backgrounds are dripping with late-19th-century atmosphere, from the gloomy cemetery to the wood and stone architecture of the buildings and manor houses. And Future has tried to stretch the point-and-click genre a bit by minimizing the puzzle content and making them a more logical fit to the story than some of the creative but out-of-place and bizarre ones that tend to appear in these games. Also, the writers have made it fairly easy to figure out where you’re supposed to go next, something that other adventures fail to do.

Problem is, Future does just about everything else wrong. Both of the lead characters are irredeemably unlikable; Moor is a predatory sociopath (at least until near the end), while Briscol is an insufferable snob, and they both speak in a dreadful monotone from beginning to end. In fact, this game contains the worst voice acting I’ve heard in a long time, and the lip synching is obviously designed for a language other than English; characters’ lips frequently continue moving long after their lines have been delivered. Although the converging storylines are a refreshing idea, Briscol’s is the only one that pushes the plot forward, while most of Moor’s story is useless exposition. Much of the story makes little sense and exposes the characters as being utter morons (if you see an empty coffin inside a vandalized tomb, would your first thought be that the coffin was empty when it was placed there?). And the pace of the game is deadly slow; you spend so much time waiting for conversations to end that you almost forget what you’re supposed to be doing.

Future Games deserves credit for trying to bridge the gap between the static adventure games of the past and the deeper, more involving ones that are starting to turn up these days. But for every step forward that Alter Ego takes, it also takes five steps backward. The game looks great and it has some good ideas, but the unsavory heroes, the unnecessarily bulky script and the ultimately unsatisfying story send it straight to the bargain bin.

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