Alter Ego PC

As any fan of a good murder mystery will tell you, there's nothing more satisfying than a surprising reveal and a shocking payoff. Unfortunately, there's a disastrous corollary to this tenet: A bad ending insults the reader and renders the plot that came before it hollow and insincere. Though point-and-click adventure game Alter Ego tries to involve you in its story with a few gruesome crimes, the crime that will strike you as most hideous is its own storytelling offenses. After an excruciatingly slow start, the tale seems like it might finally come together, only to pull the rug from underneath you with an ending so abrupt and incomplete you feel as if you just read a novel with the final two chapters ripped out of it. The end result is a story that makes the average episode of Scooby-Doo look like a sophisticated whodunit and will have you throwing your hands up in the air in disgust. Alter Ego's easy and unremarkable puzzles, which can be solved with a bunch of random clicking, offer no relief and make for a soggy and unfinished adventure that even genre fans should avoid.

You play as two different characters throughout the course of this "mystery." Timothy Moor is an Irish thief joining a fellow crook on a heist that will pay their way to the United States. Detective Briscol is a by-the-book investigator new to the town of Plymouth, England, where the funeral of a suspected murderer hasn't ended the chain of murders terrorizing the populace. Alternating between the two, you slog through cemeteries, laundries, and sewers, combining inventory items and clicking on environmental objects to progress the story. And it is quite a sluggish story. As Moor, you spend most of the game totally unaware that a mystery even exists, sneaking into mansions and inspecting crossbows. 

MINIMUM

Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Pentium III or AMD Athlon 800MHz Processor
256MB RAM
2GB Hard Disk Space
Nvidia TNT2, GeForce 1, 2 or 3, ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500 or 8500, or Matrox G450 Video Card
DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9

MAXIMUM

Windows 7/Vista (32 or 64 bit)
Intel i7 Quad Core 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent
3GB System RAM (High)
30 GB Hard dDisk Space
nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX / ATI Radeon HD4850 Video Card
Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live
DirectX 9.0 - DirectX 11