Ctrl Alt Ego PS5 Review

Ego is latin for I, first-person singular personal pronoun. Jung used Ego to define what he referred to as the center of consciousness… Ctrl Alt Ego is a first person puzzler that sees you send your consciousness between objects in order to progress. Sounds interesting… please read on.

Ctrl Alt Ego is a surprising mashup of genres that wouldn’t obviously go together… yet they really do. You are introduced to the concept quite gently, being guided to your first consciousness transfer and before long you find yourself hopping from one object to another. The thing is… you actually have some flexibility for how you get through the game… there are some sections that are fairly guided (typically when getting started it will nudge you in the right direction for how to proceed). As you learn about building up ego and just how many different things you can inhabit, the world really starts to open up.

The developers point out that the game is influenced by/inspired/a mashup of games like System Shock, Deus Ex and Prey combined with some British sci-fi such as Dr Who, Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with a smattering of stealth games thrown in for a bit of variety. That’s not a bad explanation of where the elements come from… but it still kind of needs to be experienced to really understand how it all works together. The latter mix is obviously in play in sections where you have an option to either sneak past hostile entities or… go in guns blazing. The first mix is probably best exemplified by the whole process of jumping into systems and using them to your advantage, possess a robot to move items around, jump into a terminal to operate a door or lift. The British Sci-fi… well if you’ve watched any of those referenced… you’ll have a pretty good idea of the aesthetic/story telling/humour in play here. That aesthetic is really leaning hard into the Dr Who vibe… by that I mean it’s not necessarily the prettiest of games… they are good enough to service the game and it’s everything else that will really draw you in.

That humour is possibly in play with the story telling… I mean you are being instructed by Dr Everyman. Dr Everyman wants you to eradicate a virus that has taken over a space station (which is not surprisingly where you find yourself). When I first encountered a visual representation of said virus… I was a little surprised to find it taking the form of a certain virus that we all became quite familiar with around 2020. Is the whole game being essentially confined to a space station a commentary on lockdowns? Maybe… but it’s all quite tongue in cheek. The humour is very much British in style so that might not land with some people… but those of us who were brought up on Red Dwarf and similar will feel right at home.

Ultimately Ctrl Alt Ego is very much like The Matrix… no one can really be told what Ctrl Alt Ego is, they have to experience it for themselves.

Final Thoughts:

Those with a mind for psychology might have questioned why I mentioned Jung in regard to the Ego when the (in)famous Freud introduced the concept… well Jung expanded on it and developed the notion of the collective unconscious and in a way Ctrl Alt Ego is a space station of “minds” just waiting to be connected. If you like puzzle games, a bit of humour with your gaming or just something that is a bit different then grab a copy. It’s quirky and gives you flexibility to play many different ways… for the price there’s a decent bit of replay value. Focus your attention on the game and inhabit it now.