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Reviews for "Alex"

My least favorite part about ALS is when I lost the ability to double jump. I am so heartbroken by this disease. I hope that never happens to me in real life.

Jokes aside (hopefully not offensive to anyone!) - I think this is a great game. It's cute. I like the art style. Consistent. Good controls. Fast, easy to play. Extra love and care put in some of the animations and artistic effects. Great job on that, and not just being either good game play with square blocks or nice animations with cheap game play.

Other than some screen tearing, which I don't know if anything can be done about that, I saw no real issues with it!

I tend to write reviews whenever I play games on this site, but for this one I felt EXTREMELY compelled to write something.

For anyone that stated that this game has NOTHING to do with insight on ALS, then you are a complete moron. It has everything to do with it and it states it RIGHT in the beginning of the game when the "doctor" comes in and tells him what the disease is and what will happen to him.

I think this is absolutely brilliant. And its lovely that its made. Good Work.

Hey so the game's pretty solid and the message is cool.

The one thing that bothered me though, and the only reason I'm writing this review, is that the whole story is directly told to the player, when I could have just as easily "felt" it through the increasing restrictions on the controls. I feel like the gameplay was too restricted to the story (understandably so, as it was designed to create a sense of empathy for ALS patients), but there are probably more game-design-specific ways you could have done the same thing.

If I had designed this game, I would have probably made the gameplay a little less linear. Instead of having one track the player follows, which magically adapts to the player's inabilities, I would have made one short level that the player has to traverse over and over, maybe getting another carton of milk every week. Each time, it would be a little bit harder to jump around, forcing the player to find new ways to cross the terrain each time. By the end, crossing the one level would be really difficult and time-consuming. I don't know much about ALS, but I feel like that would be a better comparison.

In the end, empathy is an emotion games can create better than any other medium, and I guess that's why I felt it so unnecessary to see text on the screen telling me what was going on. It really shouldn't bother me, and I guess it doesn't really detract from the gameplay, but it does kinda seem like you're using the text as a crutch to tell the story, when the game is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.

I think that the difficulty accurately gives "insight" to ALS, but I'm not sure that pixelated hamsters who make little farting noises when they talk is the best way to do it.

My grandmother, who had Parkinson's (another degenerative nervous system disease), experienced severely slurred speech. I understand ALS does the same thing, so I'm not sure him having a conversation moments before collapsing is the best way to depict it. Also, it all happened in the span of a trip to the grocery store, dafuq?

I do have to give you major props for making it map playable relative to your current condition status. This has excellent game design, and the insight it does offer is how it "feels" to progressively lose physical abilities.

Anyway, the game was pretty good game wise, and I'm sure it will raise a lot of awareness. That's how you cure diseases. When enough people are aware of them, they become cured. That's why cancer and AIDS are gone now.

:D

While the game is entertaining for a while it offers barely any insight into the disease, and the information is kind of dumped on you as if it was another game who somehow got stamped as ALS game of all sudden, the game tries to create some sort of story and emotion but do not care enough to convey it properly nor to take the time to strenghten the emotion it would want us to feel. The game is predictable and one would probably figure out how it would end before it even started. It feels very rushed and unfocused. The game is also absolutely not subtle in his theme and message, making it more like a playable infomercial than an actual game with an actual story.

I know this game is supposed to give an insight on ALS but quite frankly for such a serious disease it deserved more than this.