It is not about “life after death” as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: “life after ‘life after death’.” -N.T. Wright

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Alteric is one of those games that blends in with the crowd. At first glance it seemed typical of the indie platforming scene: dominated by minimalism; stark colors set in heavy contrasts of light and dark; nebulous, almost guesswork storytelling about heady philosophical and metaphysical concepts; brutally, occasionally frustratingly difficult, presumably under the pretense that too much challenge leads to celebrity.

If that all sounds like its riddled with disdain, let me clarify myself by saying that I enjoyed Alteric for what it was and any heart of negativity is probably due to that steep difficulty. Alteric seems built to elicit stereotypical gamer ragequitting, y’know that moment when full-grown adults throw their toys around like my two-year-old does. People who want others to take games seriously should seriously take a look at how ragequitting makes gamers look, if that matters to you at all, that is.

Ragequitting may get its laughs on YouTube but I’ve never found it that attractive. At least I know now that my mom was wrong when I was a kid: there’s no way I could have ever snapped a controller in half. I could barely do it when I tried it with a dead controller as a thirty-year-old.

The developers behind this enraging experience said in Alteric “We tried to develop a game in such a way that the player realized: here, Thomas [Was Alone] meets with Dark Souls.”

Dark Souls, if this is your first time on the internet, built meme-level fame on the foundation of being excruciatingly tough on its players. Understandably, there would be copycats wanting to capitalize on that characteristic and its success, which does not excuse the ubiquitous mewling that everything ever made post-Dark Souls is like Dark Souls. Since the developers expressed their intention to create a game echoing Dark Souls, which authorial intention I’ve suggested represents at least one objective basis for measuring a game’s design, here is what makes Alteric so tough and we’ll see if the game successfully packages and presents that intent.

As a modest platformer, Alteric is comprised of 27 stages of platforming spread out over 3 chapters with 3 boss fights. Your player character, a block of light, has a limited repertoire of abilities befitting this minimal game experience: moving left and right and jumping (once on the ground, once again in the air). You’ll later gain the ability to push blocks and clone yourself to obstruct lasers or create new vantage points.

The jumps, the hazards, the traps are all simple enough on their own. Spinning saws and lasers look immediately dangerous and if you’ve played a video game before then you’ll know to avoid these. Later levels combine these dangers together in some bizarre ways, and the level design ensures that you can’t see directly what’s ahead. That means that many of your many deaths in Alteric will be due to running into something you couldn’t see coming, like a waiting row of spikes at the bottom of a slope.

Trial and error in very short bursts makes up most of Alteric’s gameplay. Death takes your block back to the start of the level or to one of the game’s uncommon spawning points, which means each level is a prolonged obstacle course demanding muscle memory, skill, and bucket loads of determination.

The mainline feature of Alteric is definitely phasing between two planes of existence. On most of the levels, you can press a button and shift the background from one color to another. This reveals blocks, platforms, traps which exist on one of the two planes but not on the other. Of course you’ll be required to phase mid-jump, revealing safe spaces for your block to land on or phasing out spinning saws just before contact.

The parallel worlds keep Alteric interesting and more engaging than the typical minimalist platformer. They guarantee you remain vigilant about your surroundings at all times and force to you consider your leaps before your take them. Add in quirks like buttons that trigger anti-gravity and there were several instances when I had to stop and plot out how I wanted to proceed.

Even with a plan, a huge part of Alteric is timing…

The product description for Alteric describes it thusly:

You are alone. Are you lonely? You’re lost. Or stuck? Somewhere…but where? And most importantly, who are you?

Only Yesterday You Were A Man. Today Everything Has Changed. You Died.

But your soul is still there. It’s a piece of light energy trapped in the alien space between two worlds.

That’s an interesting backdrop, potentially exploring an in-between dimension after death. Life before life after death? Alteric apparently doesn’t intend to deliver on developing these themes or answering these questions, but I think that description at least explains its title.

If this game’s spiritual predecessor, Thomas Was Alone, was about anthropomorphic shapes and their relationships in life, Alteric is about an anthropomorphic shape in isolation, alone after death, transformed from one shape to another. “Alt-eric” stars an “alternative Eric”, an individual who has been fundamentally changed into a piece of light in the final frontier.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2018/04/04/alteric-2018-switch/