AlterEgo: Browser-Based Life Simulation Game
What if you could live your life over again? In Alter Ego, you can find out. In this text-based interactive fiction, you choose what happens next. It's in the style of choose-a-path books, but with over a thousand multiple-choice questions, it's much longer and deeper than traditional gamebooks. Alter Ego starts at birth and ends at death, including two substantially different versions, depending on whether you choose to be male or female. Will you grow up to be confident and happy? Will you fight with bullies, or befriend them? Will you find a date to the senior prom? Will you marry and have kids, or start your own business and become a millionaire? The choice is yours. If you enjoy interactive novels, you'll love Alter Ego. This game will change your life. (official Text) Developer's Comment: "Alter Ego was originally written by Peter J. Favaro, Ph.D. It was published in 1986 for the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Apple II, and Macintosh. The current edition of the Alter Ego game is a production of Choose Multiple LLC." (https://www.playalterego.com/credits.html)
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Alter Ego has some great things to admire. The concept is ambitious and unique, especially for the time. The narrator gives psychological insights into your character, in response to your decisions. These were very interesting, and definitely the game's biggest strength. They encouraged a grounded and respectful approach to how you think about different moments, and it caused me to reflect on my own life in various ways. Any media that achieves that clearly has something special about it.
The main problem with Alter Ego is that there isn't nearly as much replayability as initially presented. Sure, there are different outcomes for individual scenarios, but when it comes to the game as a whole? There's not actually much variety; you either live a pretty uneventful life into old age, or die prematurely and end the game. Different decisions don't create any unique scenarios to develop your overall story, they just affect the immediate situation and your stats. No matter your career, the size of your house, your social status, etc, you will experience the same situations nearly every playthrough. The outcomes of your decisions are treated more as afterthoughts, rather than having any proper impact on the game. The most significant decision is whether you play as a male or female. This is only at the start, and you don't get to consistently impact the game throughout.
I don't want to make it seem as if I dislike this game. I'm probably asking too much for an interactive fiction from 1986. Still, Alter Ego is something I appreciate more than I enjoy. After a first playthrough, it suffers from diminishing returns.