ALEX IS: A Two-Day Collaborative Game

"ALEX IS: A Two-Day Collaborative Game" is a very difficult project for me to judge fairly since it's a community game created by members of the old Gaming World forums. The difficulty here isn't that I wasn't a member of those forums. After all, I sort of exist on the edge of this community in my opinion since the bulk of my interactions come from responding to posts about my reviews or Let's Play. And a few of those have really pissed certain members/former members of the community off over the years. I'm looking at you "Akage" and "War of Two Worlds". The latter of which got so heated that unity actually locked the comment section.

The issue here is that "ALEX IS: A Two-Day Collaborative Game" is an incoherent mess in terms of story and varies wildly in terms of quality and graphical style. Some of this can be accounted for in the game's story with the player's character being banished to the Wastelands of Endless Illusion for murdering a romantic rival for the boy she was interested in. On the other hand, this doesn't change my opinion that the radical shifts in the story, gameplay, and graphics make reviewing this game basically impossible since it's essentially dozens of smaller games that have been stapled together to form a nonsensical whole.

In fact, the only people that will truly appreciate this game are probably people that were familiar with the various creators and share a connection with them. As someone who lacks that it was probably only natural that I absolutely hated playing this game. So much so that I kind of regret doing a Let's Play for this project. After all, getting through this project was almost as tedious as beating some of the stuff made by Redwall10 over the years where you needed to sort trash or bake cakes in order to get enough money or levels in order to be powerful enough to take on the final boss. And you would have to do those tasks for hours in order to get strong enough which meant you would be tapping on the z key non-stop for hours. In order to make this process slightly less tedious I'd usually pop in a movie or watch old video game reviews by thespponyone (Noah Antwiler) in order to help pass the time, but that only made the non-stop tapping more bearable. It didn't make it fun by any stretch of the imagination.

After all, I was still performing a tedious task where I just kept tapping away on the z key for hours at a time while watching stuff I'd seen a few times already. This is because I couldn't afford to get so engrossed in what I was watching that I would stop tapping away. After all, I need that money for powerful gear or those levels to have high enough stats to make beating the final boss even feasible.

And in much the same vain I forced myself to play through this game until I had gotten through enough maps that I could see the game's ending. So I basically just kept tapping away until I was done. At least this game was shorter than "Nightmare School" or certain entries in the Outcast series. So it could have been worse. At the same time, I don't think I can really rate this project since it shows what the community of an old gaming site was like. In a way this game is like a time capsule and that mans it can only truly be appreciated through the eyes of nostalgia which I don't have. As such, I'm not going to assign a numerical score to this old community game from a bygone era.

As for why I hate this game so much. It's because it's a hodgepodge of different mini-games stapled together that massively shift in terms of looks. You might start out on a map inspired by Pokemon then go to a map inspired by old noir films from the 50s to a map that is entirely RTP to a map that is more heavily inspired by anime. Not only is the game shifting massively in terms of tones because of the looks of the various maps the gameplay itself wildly shifts between maps as well.

You might go to a map that features a puzzle game where you need to put a series of events in the proper order, to a map that features an active battle system, to a puzzle game where you need to work out the correct path to advance, to a game about staying alive for a period of time by avoiding bullets.

And while the gameplay shifts from map to map the story also feels like it's shifting from Alexis being a total psychopath to a more sympathetic character depending on the developer's interpretation of the setup. As such the game shifts wildly in terms of the narrative's tone.

In fact, this isn't a game, but over 50 games that have been stapled together by a connection that is too tenuous to support it. At best this project is a slightly better version of "Action 52" since all of the games are centered around a single character, but I'd argue it's probably worse since that character doesn't have a consistent feel to how she fits into the narrative as you go from one map to another.

Effectively this project is a slog for me because of the hodgepodge nature this project has. And it has that hodgepodge nature because dozens of developers are building mini-games based on a rough setup but lack any sort of consistent vision on who Alexis and what kind of game they are building around her.