Imagine for a second, you're a ghost. We're running on some classic ghost story shit, so let's say you can possess just about anything you want and fiddle with it. How would you assert your influence on the physical plane? Most, uh, totally real ghosts, assert it via doing really dumb shit like spelling out memes on Ouija boards. But if you were in this position and wanted to actually do something, imagining stuff from the perspective of a disembodied conscious is actually pretty fun. Video games have been working for a while now towards this semi-puzzlebox design. You've got a basic observational puzzle, and then the game lets the physics engine or other nuanced mechanics do the work, so it's only natural that their finest conceptual evolution would be a game where you basically are the puzzlebox. You create your own mechanisms to solve anything you want, in just your own way, limited only is the fact that you need to manage a resource to keep possessing things, which really makes you prioritize each decision for what you possess- something that comes in really handy to remember across the large-scale maps where items can be transported super long distances. Ctrl Alt Ego perhaps doesn't falter on its great concept immediately, but creeping issues strike it in one clear cut way: conformity.
You're in a room full of objects you can possess, you have 15 Ego points left and you want to be wise. You could possess an enemy for 10 points, but that's a heavy drain of Ego, and, if you run out of juice, or have your new host destroyed, you're fucked. The easier bet might be possessing something to sneak around that a percentage of enemies don't care about, but you might be shit out of luck if some do care later down the line, or if you need to get to a tough-to-reach place. Instead, you might try to prepare a bomb, or a destructible object, to immediately kill your enemies, allowing yourself to get past without draining much Ego at all in case you need it later. Here's the plot twist: a situation like this almost never happens in the campaign. Inside your poltergeist toolbox, is an infinitely replicatable host body, which has its own toolbox- one that merely relies on easily replaceable resources and RPG upgrade systems to decimate most encounters. The vast majority of objects you can place yourself in, are actually pretty useless, and the game outright teases you into possessing them by giving you Ego, or allowing you to read text that gives clues on what to do, locking you mentally in "hold possess button in new room" mode frequently. This straight up means you're almost never short on Ego, and the system begins to crumble. Player expression is at a maximum, but at what cost? These intricate systems at play are almost never fully utilized, as running in and using some combination of basic Bug 22-centric tools fixes everything. For as much as you're a disembodied consciousness, you sure feel very... embodied in this game. Most goals you have amount to simplistic things, too, like grabbing an object, or possessing a certain thing for a split second and then going back to your Bug- again, usually stuff that merely demands your usual host body. Puzzles with the host body don't actually tend to reach their maximum either: all the other Bugs are, effectively, useless, and have no tools of their own, besides being used to open doors. It ends in Ctrl Alt Ego having the makings of a puzzle game that could appeal to fans and non-fans of the genre alike, except the best method to win is to not scratch your brain at all. For such a negative take-away, I'll let you know I enjoyed the game a lot still, and I think this will slowly go down as one of those must-plays in the modern indie sphere. It's unabashedly original in some ways (and not in others, but I digress) so all I can ask for the sequel is for the game to stroke its own Ego a little, and run less on the possessed qualities of certain other shooter-adventure-puzzler-RPG-simulation-type games that it takes the form of so often.
You're in a room full of objects you can possess, you have 15 Ego points left and you want to be wise. You could possess an enemy for 10 points, but that's a heavy drain of Ego, and, if you run out of juice, or have your new host destroyed, you're fucked. The easier bet might be possessing something to sneak around that a percentage of enemies don't care about, but you might be shit out of luck if some do care later down the line, or if you need to get to a tough-to-reach place. Instead, you might try to prepare a bomb, or a destructible object, to immediately kill your enemies, allowing yourself to get past without draining much Ego at all in case you need it later. Here's the plot twist: a situation like this almost never happens in the campaign. Inside your poltergeist toolbox, is an infinitely replicatable host body, which has its own toolbox- one that merely relies on easily replaceable resources and RPG upgrade systems to decimate most encounters. The vast majority of objects you can place yourself in, are actually pretty useless, and the game outright teases you into possessing them by giving you Ego, or allowing you to read text that gives clues on what to do, locking you mentally in "hold possess button in new room" mode frequently. This straight up means you're almost never short on Ego, and the system begins to crumble. Player expression is at a maximum, but at what cost? These intricate systems at play are almost never fully utilized, as running in and using some combination of basic Bug 22-centric tools fixes everything. For as much as you're a disembodied consciousness, you sure feel very... embodied in this game. Most goals you have amount to simplistic things, too, like grabbing an object, or possessing a certain thing for a split second and then going back to your Bug- again, usually stuff that merely demands your usual host body. Puzzles with the host body don't actually tend to reach their maximum either: all the other Bugs are, effectively, useless, and have no tools of their own, besides being used to open doors. It ends in Ctrl Alt Ego having the makings of a puzzle game that could appeal to fans and non-fans of the genre alike, except the best method to win is to not scratch your brain at all. For such a negative take-away, I'll let you know I enjoyed the game a lot still, and I think this will slowly go down as one of those must-plays in the modern indie sphere. It's unabashedly original in some ways (and not in others, but I digress) so all I can ask for the sequel is for the game to stroke its own Ego a little, and run less on the possessed qualities of certain other shooter-adventure-puzzler-RPG-simulation-type games that it takes the form of so often.