Analysis of the experience of otherness – A house, cornfields and extraterrestrials

In Alterity Experience we will have to protect our house from an invasion of aliens and discover what relationship this has with our family

The alien theme is a very recurring theme in movies, books or video games. Human beings’ fear of what is in space, or whether life from another planet could invade ours, has given rise to cinematographic works such as Alien the eighth passenger, or games video ranging from Space Invaders to Destroy All Humans. . ONITRON Studio and Dolores Entertainment’s Alterity Experience is a new representative of this type of game and is strongly reminiscent of other works such as Shyamalan’s Signs. We will see if this game is worth it or, on the c ontrary, no, stay to find out everything.

Home alone and with aliens

The title’s story begins with our protagonist, Anton Cornwell, in his office, with numerous newspaper clippings talking about UFO sightings, as well as a completely purple corn swamp from his harvest for some strange reason. His whole family leaves the house as they go to the movies, but he stays to investigate what is going on with his cultivation and his UFO sightings. While we are in our office, we hear a car noise and we think that it is our wife and our children who have forgotten something, but no, it is a strange being trying to enter the house. Here our adventure will begin where we will have to find out what is going on and make sure that no stranger enters the house. The story isn’t bad and is followed with expectation, but the ending is very abrupt and the character development is very flat..

Keys and home automation

Our adventure will be based exclusively on going around the house reading documents and solving puzzles, which mainly consist of finding a key that opens a locked area of ​​the house, so we are closer to a walking simulator than an action or adventure game. Although there is also room for more eventful moments. On some occasions, the aliens will try to enter the house, so we must avoid it. This gives rise to a very interesting but little exploited mechanism, and that is the use of home automation in our home. And it is that through our mobile we can control the doors and windows of our house, thus preventing our enemies from entering our house.

This mechanism is very simple, on our mobile we are shown the window or door through which they are trying to enter, and we must select it to close it. The use of home automation is interesting since it could give very funny s ituations in the game, but this is not the case, since it is limited to closing and opening windows or doors.

It could have been used in puzzles, with the use of light, television, volume, to name a few examples. In addition, this mechanism is completely dispensable, since you can play the game without any complications without using it and closing windows and doors manually. The game even rewards you with an achievement if you complete the game without using this mechanic, which is very simple.

Shadows and lots of lights

Alterity Experience doesn’t look bad graphically. The game uses Unreal Engine 4 and on Xbos Series X, as you can see from the images that accompany this review, the title looks good. The scenes are well recreated and the models of the objects are well done, but there is one point that tarnishes the rest, the use of lights. The lights make the game really blurry, because the title’s brightness is too high and does not allow you to see certain elements of the scene

. There is an option to lower the brightness, but this problem is not solved even by lowering this brightness to the minimum. Due to this issue, I was unable to complete the ending of the title, as some symbols needed to complete the game were not visible. In order to finish the title, I had to lower the brightness of my television almost to the minimum.

The sound aspect is okay without more, the sound performance is a little poor (these are interpreted in English, although the audio and documents are translated into Spanish) and the ambient sound is well done, causing some tension at the player. Although a negative point is that Alterity Experience does not have ambient music. It’s true that sometimes it makes the title more tense, because everything is silent, but when you’ve been playing for 40 minutes and it hasn’t passed and everything is silent, the tension turns into monotony and boredom.

Conclusions of the experience of otherness

Alterity Experience is a mid-range walking simulator. It has very interesting but unexploited ideas and a very abrupt ending that tarnishes an interesting story.. Fans of the genre can appreciate it, or players who like short titles (lasts between an hour and a half or two). If some interesting mechanics like home automation had been further developed or if the story had been worked on more, we would speak of a good game. Bugs and graphical problems also do not help this ONITRON Studio and Dolores Entertainment game to be a worthy title.