The oldest bildungsroman in gaming I can think of was a welcome relief from genre's dominant fantasy subject matter during the 80s. ALTER EGO was made by a psychology professor and sometimes the playing resembles answering an extensive questionnaire about your life and its travails while living a part you're assigned. On the other hand, introspection isn't bad. You walk through life replete with choices you make as a male or female (though including other genders would have been great) of many dispositions and a number of moods. You can give truthful answers or not, be benevolent or malevolent, and each answer determines the way your afterlife plays out. Sets of questions are grouped under icons on the screen that cover an area of life -emotional, social, defining moments and rights of passage, intellectual life and the accruement of knowledge etc and there are thousands upon thousands of questions appearing randomly. Your aim is to develop into a functional human being without dying in the process. Deliberately making wrong decisions will also enable you to have a differennt kind of fun and see how you can end your life in the game - and again, there are dozens of ways to do it.
The replay value and the fact that Alter Ego was one of the very few games in my c64 collection with a "save game" option made playing this game a truly unique experienc. It could have done with some music and maybe some funny fx to spice it up, but nevetheless it's ace.
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