Simplicity can be beautiful. Sometimes being simple is a good thing, in the case of Alteric, simplicity is not enough to keep you playing. Alteric took me roughly four hours to finish its three chapter campaign, which entails of thirty short levels, but my four hour play through felt like an eternity with the game. Alteric is a simple 2D-platformer available on every console, but that doesn’t mean its worth your time. I reviewed this game on the Nintendo Switch and I will be going over why I think Alteric is not worth your time in a market that is saturated with platform games.
The first thing that stands out about this game is how simple it looks and plays. Alteric is made of three chapters and each chapter is made of ten level including a boss at the end of each chapter. But as you progress through these difficult levels, there is nothing that sets them apart from the last one, yes there are new obstacles, and yes each level grows harder as you go deeper in the game, but that’s it, the scenery seems to stay the same, the music plays the same songs over and over to the point where I had to turn the music completely off as I was approaching the finish line in chapter 3 because of how annoyed I was getting with these songs. Having played Celeste and platform classic, “Limbo”, Alteric really left a bad taste in my mouth. Where Celeste and Limbo shined was in their level designs, each time that you climbed higher up the mountain in Celeste you were treated to a different scenery, to a different look, and for a game in which you are going to spend hours is, the scenery can be crucial. In Limbo, the deeper you got in to this world the darker things got, the quicker you were coming to the realization of where you were and what you were doing in this world, leaving us gamer with one of the most satisfying experiences to date. But Alteric doesn’t provide that, Alteric’s boring, bland, “simple” aesthetic makes the game you should pass.
Alteric also doesn’t provide a difficulty setting and for someone that just wants to play a platform game without having to try the same level over and over again this may be a turn off. At the end of each chapter, Alteric provides you with a boss, in your journey you will face three bosses, and once again I feel like this was a missed opportunity for the game. Each boss feels like a copy-and-paste version of previous bosses. They all look the same and to a certain extent, play the same. The idea of having a boss at the end of a chapter is a great idea because you can put everything you learned throughout the chapter into this boss to test your skills but not here, not in Alteric.
As I finish my review, and I guess its needless to say, I don’t recommend Alteric to anyone, if you are in the market for a 2D-Platformer there are other games out in the market for you to sink your time. Alteric, at the end of the day, is a perfect example of why simple is not always better.