Mandela Catalogue Games: Spot the Alternates

Three free games are built on the series itself, and Wikipedia's article on The Mandela Catalogue names all three. Maple County was made in 2021 by Thorne Baker, who later acted in the series and wrote and composed for it. It is a police training tape on VHS: you are shown faces and must choose who is a person and who is an Alternate. Assessment Examination is a job questionnaire for the Authenticity Assessment Department, answered on a flickering black-and-white screen, where you mark faces as trust or threat until the exam shows what it was testing for. Both take minutes rather than hours.

Alternate Watch is the longest of the three and the most like a game. It borrows the rules of I'm on Observation Duty: you watch a family home through black-and-white security cameras from midnight until 6 am and report every anomaly, from objects that move to mimics, distorted impersonators, a shadow figure with white eyes and a whispering cloaked Preacher. If you enjoy it, I'm on Observation Duty itself is the series that started the camera-watching formula.

Outside the fan games, the same fear has become a genre of its own. That's not my Neighbor puts you behind a doorman's window in 1955, comparing each visitor's face and papers against the records to catch the doppelgangers. No, I'm not a Human keeps you in a locked house at night as strangers beg for shelter, and you check them for the signs the TV warns about before deciding who stays. Who's at the door? turns the doubt on yourself: a patient with psychosis, trapped in a small house for eight days, must tell real visitors from hallucinations before opening the door. GATE 37 is a short free visual novel played in the browser, about guarding a gate for seven nights and choosing which strange visitors are human enough to pass.

More doppelganger games have followed. Doppelpartment, a free pixel-art game made in RPG Maker, makes you the manager of an apartment block for a week after a soldier warns that some tenants have been replaced: you collect rent, knock on doors and report the copies, with plenty of body horror. Shift at Midnight puts the check behind a gas station counter, alone or with up to two friends, where you compare each customer's ID to a database and decide whether to let them go or shoot them; miss one and it comes back as a monster. They Looked Like Us is a free six-minute game about skinwalkers in which an emergency broadcast tells you to turn off every light and close every curtain before they find you. And Directive 8020, from The Dark Pictures series, takes the idea into space: a crashed colony crew hunted by an alien that perfectly imitates its prey, never sure who is still human.

Start with Maple County or Assessment Examination for ten minutes of the series' own style, play Alternate Watch for a full night shift, and move on to That's not my Neighbor, No, I'm not a Human or Doppelpartment when you want a longer game built on the same doubt, or Shift at Midnight to share it with friends.

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