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I’ve said it before, but I really keep meaning to play Ctrl Alt Ego. Released last year, it’s a sci-fi immersive sim built all around classic abilities of the genre: remote control and possession. You bounce your digital consciousness between robots and devices and ach, I hear it’s great. I’ve bought it. I’ve installed it. I’ve played the first part of the tutorial. And then, who knows. One day. One day very soon. But right now, for people who have played it, good news: a free update has added a Sandbox mode generating squillions of new levels.
The new Sandbox mode offers new procedurally generated levels. They might not have the polish and flair of the main game, but they’ll almost certainly show you something unfamiliar. 22 sliders let you influence everything from aspects of architecture to difficulty, and then it’ll spit out a new level for you. You can share good/bad/interesting level seeds with others players, and likewise play theirs.
See the v1.2 patch notes for more info on the update. It also added two new tailored standalone missions, including one built upon another genre staple: crates.
You can get Ctrl Alt Ego from Steam, where you’ll also find a demo. It’s on sale right now to celebrate the sandbox launch, with a 30% discount bringing it down to £11.19/€13.29/$13.99 until Monday the 29th.
We’ve called Ctrl Alt Ego both one of the best hacking games and the best puzzle games. I really, really do mean to get around to it.
Ctrl Alt Ego is one of many interesting games in a fizzing little indie immersive sim scene. Many of the big names (and big budgets) of the genre have toppled, with Deus Ex is on indefinite hiatus again (though a rumour claims a new one is coming), System Shock 3 changed developers then vanished, and the latest game from modern imsim champions Arkane was forgettable open-world FPS Redfall. Yet developers with far smaller teams and budgets are every weekend filling Twitter’s #ScreenshotSaturday with peeks at games including Spectra, RetroSpace, Etos, Corpus Edax, and Dog’s World. And hell, away from parochial concerns of the Looking Glass tradition, the sandbox puzzle-solving and murder of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is huge right now and it’ll be interesting to see the ripples of that across years to come.