Alt-Frequencies

Genre: Visual Novel / Text Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Note: This game is included in the Accidental Queens Collection, along with A Normal Lost Phone and Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story.

Alt-Frequencies is a fairly unique game that fits somewhere between a Graphic Novel and a Text Adventure. Originally released on mobile devices and PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020, Alt-Frequencies is a game that has players living through repeated time loops and influencing the world by recording snippets from radio programs and then playing those audio clips to other radio stations in the form of call-in submissions to those stations.

As a result of this, Alt-Frequencies is a game whose presentation revolves almost entirely around its audio, as the only visuals this game offers are a static view of your radio and different-colored top border to give a visual signifier to make it easier to quickly identify which station you’re on. While this does threaten to be visually monotonous, it works well enough for the gameplay and ensures that the focus is squarely on the sound and the accompanying text.

As for that sound, this game thankfully does have some solid voice acting for its variety of characters that really helps to flesh them out, and every station has its own sound profile of jingles, commercials, or framing music to make its identity clear – you have your straight-laced news radio station, a shock jock talk radio station, talking heads on a pop radio station, and a student radio station, along with a few other stations that at least initially appear to be randomness your radio is picking up but not a radio station proper. For the stations that have music, the music here varies in quality, but there’s some good pop and electronic music here that I wouldn’t mind hearing pop up on my own radio while radio surfing, like Ecdysis, Hopeful For Today, and Sleep.

The story presented here is fascinating, but also frustrating. Apparently, your government is on the verge of a major vote on whether or not your local government will make use of some nebulously-explained time loop technology. However, unknown to most of the general populace, the time loop has already been turned on prematurely, and only a select portion of the populace (including you) are aware that time is repeating.

I love the framing of this story, but it doesn’t take long to poke some major holes in it – it would be a simple matter to prove this “conspiracy theory” to anyone with half a brain by simply recording someone and then playing their own voice back for them earlier on the next loop. There’s also the issue that the nature of the game being about time loops causes its own logic to fall apart whenever you progress, because you’ll inexplicably break out of one time loop and start another one later that day, or perhaps even the next day. Also, changes you make in the time loop continue to affect the course of things even after time loops around again.

Of course, we’re never really properly explained just how this time loop technology is supposed to work, what the government is purportedly looking to use it for, and what it is actually seeking to use it for (because… surprise, surprise… they’re obviously not on the up and up here). I think many of this game’s issues can be tracked back to one core problem – its overall short length. At only 1-2 hours, its length already makes this a fairly bite-sized experience, but that short length also means that we’re not getting important world-building to establish characters and major plot elements, including the absolutely vital explanation of just what this time loop technology is all about.

There’s another problem too, and that’s that the game doesn’t give players enough ways to influence its world, and at times it’s not even clear what the game wants you to do to progress the story. This became particularly frustrating for one point late in the game where you essentially have to arbitrarily blast one character’s massage to three other stations piecemeal, with no rhyme or reason as to why each of these stations would only be influenced by one part of the message.

Because of these issues, I see Alt-Frequencies less as a game and more as a proof of concept. I feel like this is the videogame equivalent of a short student film that’s a great idea but that I would prefer to see expanded into a full-length motion picture. There are some great elements here all in the right places to do something wonderful, and it shows so much promise, but its short length limits the game so severely that I can’t give it a strong recommendation to anyone other than those looking to explore some cool concepts that just aren’t fleshed-out enough.

tl;dr – Alt-Frequencies is a game that’s a bit like a Visual Novel or Text Adventure, with players influencing a time loop by recording snippets of radio stations and then sending those sound clips to other radio stations as call-in submissions. It’s a clever concept and a promising premise, but the game’s short 1-2 hour length is so limiting that the game never has the time to reach its full potential.

Grade: C

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