How you respond to the quizzes and dialogue trees put to you will determine which of the distinct endings you attain. You’ll go through several cycles of tapping thought bubbles, completing tasks and working through sessions with Es until you complete the game. Alter Ego, on the other hand, has a definitive ending - three of them, in fact. Many clickers are designed to be endless. Each round of questions ends with a little analysis, pointing out a trait in your personality. The multiple-choice questions centre on personality traits are you easily influenced by others? Do difficult situations make you work harder? Do you get jealous easily? There are also association games, as well as hypothetical scenarios requiring you to choose from possible outcomes.

Much of the in-game psycho-analysis draws from Freud’s controversial theories of the Id, Ego and Super-ego. Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on To find out about yourself Alter Ego has more depth than you’d expect, promising to reveal something of your own psychological tendencies. It all adds up to something quite unique, and surprisingly emotive a clicker with a ticker.

The Alter Ego experience is underpinned by a mood-setting piano and vocal score, while the graphics and dialogue draw heavily from Japan’s popular Visual Novels. Not exactly a rehash of Cookie Clicker, then. In book-filled rooms, a mysterious, expressionless girl called Es guides you through multiple-choice questions designed to reveal something of your inner self - and discovers something of herself in the process. Everything is black and white, save for the occasional blue butterfly fluttering by. You drift through shadowy corridors, tapping on pensive thought bubbles to accumulate ‘ego’ currency.

Here are three reasons you should wander down its corridors of self-reflection…įor the atmosphere Alter Ego is a bit like a dream. With Alter Ego, Japanese studio Caramel Column has produced an incremental game all about self-discovery. Despite the genre’s simple mechanics, some developers come up with some surprisingly imaginative ideas. There are clickers in which you become a successful novelist, battle through roguelike dungeons, mine for meme-themed currency, and so on. Incremental games come in all shapes and sizes, and weird and wonderful premises.

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