The Alters Review (Prometheus)
This game is amazing, honestly stunning in it's writing, visual design, philosophical questioning, sound design, and so much more. After my first night of playing it I thought it would easily end up in my top 5 of all time, but sadly its starting to sink a bit as I slow down. My biggest issue with the game is the stress, the constant time management with so many spinning plates feels like you have to do everything perfectly. When I ran out of time and the sun arrived I had to go back a good 5 or 6 days to start doing things in a more optimal way. I understand that the stress and time elements are meant to be there, I understand that the intensity of making hard decisions is a major design choice, I just wish that the game would let up for a while. It feels like there's so much to do, not enough time to do it all, and no feeling of reward for making one choice over another.
That's what's really missing, is that the choices you make don't feel good. So many of the the choices in the game (and I'm only around act 2 so far) feel unrewarding. It doesn't feel like you made a difficult choice with an outcome you can be happy with or one you want to live with. It just leaves you with a feeling that you didn't play optimally enough. This story is one I am so invested in, one I want to finish, but it's so difficult to stay invested when it feels like you're constantly drowning. I'm going to try to push through the end but honestly I really feel like I need to space this game out a bit more and play it in smaller increments so that I can actually relax in my free time.
If there were a fix, I would honestly love an "easy" or "story" difficulty setting that greatly extends the time you have at specific stops along your journey. As the game goes on the stress only increases, you building up this great base with a great team doesn't make things easier, if anything it makes things a lot harder now that you have so many more plates to spin. That and I've noticed quite a few bugs here and there that I'm sure will be resolved in time, but one time I lost the game because It hadn't registered that I had built a dormitory and that all the alters were happy for example. I re-loaded the day, did everything almost exactly the same, slept again, and survived the night.
Between the bugs, the stress, and the lack of a manual save feature it makes this game a hard one to recommend right out of the gate. But, with that being said, I still do recommend it for it's overwhelmingly great story, visuals, and ideas. The Alters is a unique concept, one that I don't know if any or much of story telling has dealt with yet, at least not in this exact way. It's truly a wonderful experience as long as you can manage the stress the game wants to throw your way as well.