Alterity Experience – Review

After moving out to the family ranch in Northern California our protagonist Anton Cornwell is enjoying a peaceful life when rumours of strange phenomenon in the area pass you by like the sun-soaked days.

Everything’s “California dreamin” until a strange purple substance appears affecting all crops in the area, so with the wife and kids out at the movies, it’s time to investigate.
You’ll explore your residence using the regular FPS controls to move, crouch and run around as you try to get to the bottom of what’s going off with the mysterious purple substance, starting off with a rock-like fragment on your desk.

You soon discover it leaves traces of purple on anything it touches, before seeing some strange purple lights, followed by your automated door shutters opening up, you’re quickly prompted to close the door and hit the conveniently placed switch next to them to re-close the shutters. It seems your interaction with the purple fragment alerted some form of alien entity to your presence and they want to come in for a cup of tea with a side portion of anal probing, so it’s probably best to keep them out, and you securely inside.

For the main portion of the game, you’ll need to explore the rooms of your house to find keys to access locked rooms while facing a few sessions of cat and mouse as you jog around to close a few randomly opening shutters again. Thankfully, if you want to avoid leg day, you can pull up your mobile phone and using the smart-home app, easily see and select specific shutters rather than racing around for them.

Your trusty handheld smart-companion also comes with a much needed flashlight, flicked on with the “Y” button, which will come in handy when the power goes out and you have to make that Inevitable trip to the fuse box. There’s a few twists and turns through the relatively short duration of the game, and while in a few sections, it’s not immediately obvious what you need to do, but a couple of lines of dialogue aren’t usually too far away to let you know what you should have been doing for the last 5 minutes.

Throughout the entirety of the approximately 3 hours of gameplay, there’s a little exploration, reading documents, making discoveries to give a little backstory and a little cat & mouse. Towards the end of the game, there’s one section which is reliant on briefly displayed symbols that you have to spot from a distance… It’s easy to miss one, not being able to see one clearly, or just fail by getting too close, but after a good half hour of failure, I eventually found the right symbols to finish off that final section. But I found turning down “noise” in the game settings, and lowering my TV brightness a little, made it far easier to see the correct symbols.

Graphically, while it’s made by a very small development team, and rings familiar to other similar games which are verging on “walking simulator”, Alterity Experience, won’t blow your socks off with its graphics or sound, but it does a great job of setting an atmosphere, and providing a mysterious thriller that doesn’t rely on jump scares or set-pieces.

There’s genuine suspense and intrigue as our alien friends are pretty insistent on getting inside, and while there’s no deep story, there’s enough mystery to keep you guessing and progressing forward.
The randomised elements of gameplay such as the specific location of keys, and those symbols are the end, help to make it a little more difficult than simply following a guide, so whether you come away with around 800 or the full 1000 Gamerscore after a single-playthrough, there’s still a sense of Achievement when the credits eventually roll.

Looking at the negatives, and for a small Indie game it’s fair to expect a few, there’s some awkward pop-in, which is unfortunately noticeable, distant reflections is one thing, but seeing picture frames pop onto the wall on the opposite side of the room is a little dissapointing.
Equally, the overall voice-acting is a little flat, but perfectly matches the reality that it’s an artist off Fiverr and not a fully professional voice-actor.

Like many elements, the familiar theme is “it’s not bad”, but there’s quite a few areas that could have been considerably better and more detailed which would have really helped Alterity Experience fulfil its extra-terrestrial calling

Regardless of a few noticeably “indie” shortcomings, There’s a lot to love about Alterity Experience, while relatively short, there’s enough Intrigue, challenge and exploration, careful balanced with uncertainty and discovery to make it a game I can recommend to anyone who enjoys some sci-fi alien mystery, or even just a good quality walking sim.

Alterity Experience doesn’t break the mould too much, but there’s enough fresh elements that keep it interesting throughout and with those last few Achievements for collections all keys and seeing all documents, I can imagine people will happily play through a second time, which is obviously a much quicker playthrough, but it’s helped along by that random key placement.
In total Alterity Experience is likely to offer most gamers a good 3-5 hours. At less than £10, it represents a fair price, any higher and I think that short playtime would be more of an issue and any less and it wouldn’t be respectful to the mostly great work from the developers…

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