From time to time, we all wonder about the road not travelled. Usually we presume that taking alternate paths in life would have led us somewhere… better, and don’t really think about the very real possibility that the alternate versions of us would have dealt with as much shit as we did or more. That kind of whimsical daydreaming is meant to make us feel better about ourselves by imagining what could have been; it’s not meant to remind us that any parallel timeline we could have segued into might have been just as crappy as this one sometimes is. The Alters, from 11 bit Studios, is a game about not only examining those possible other futures, but actively embracing them, warts and all, in the name of survival.
You play Jan Dolski, a kind of deep space construction worker employed as a mobile base builder by Ally Corp, one of those utterly dystopian, borderline psychotic future corporations that would set their employees on fire to save on fuel bills. After crashing on an alien world, Jan finds that he is the only survivor, and is going to have to man the entire mobile base by himself, which would be an impossible task for anyone, let alone a lowly builder. Luckily, the planet Jan has been sent to is home to a unique resource called Rapidium – and Jan’s handlers back on Earth have a solution.
Using the base’s Quantum Computer, Jan is able to view his recorded life path and then simulate an entire future based on choices he made, literally allowing him to view the road not taken. And thanks to Rapidium and a module in the base called the womb, he can create clones of himself into which to implant these alternate life paths, creating Alters, versions of Jan who believe they have lived completely different lives up to the point that they left on the mission.
The setup is incredibly tantalising, furnishing you with a total of ten alternate Jan’s to create but only allowing you to create up to six in a playthrough, meaning it’s impossible to see every story in one go. The game itself is also divided into three very different activities, which will all require attention throughout.
First of all, there’s exploration. In order to survive, Jan needs resources, so you’ll need to gather Metals, Minerals, Organics, and, of course, Rapidium. But you’ll also need to search the surrounding wilds for Jan’s lost possessions, and points of interest. During these moments it becomes a third-person adventure game, as Jan dons his spacesuit and goes out into the rugged alien landscape. You’ll need to overcome obstacles like blocked paths, high climbable walls, and Anomalies.
These spatial distortions pop up throughout the story, steadily becoming more dangerous and interesting as you progress. To destroy them you’ll need a special piece of equipment called a Luminator – but Jan can’t invent one. After all, he’s no scientist – but there’s a version of him that is. This is where creating your Alters comes in, and social management is the second main tenet of The Alters.
See it’s all well and good creating a Scientist to invent things and a Technician to repair the base, maybe a Botanist to help grow food, or a Shrink to help you through the hard times, but you’ll need to give them somewhere to sleep, make sure there’s enough food, and provide amenities like a gym, infirmary, and toilets. A huge slice of The Alters focuses on social interaction, learning to live together and overcome problems as a team.
They won’t always get on with each other, and they certainly won’t always agree with your choices. Each Alter has a unique, fleshed-out personality, with some of them exhibiting genuinely interesting characteristics. The Technician is surly and angry, but has a sensitive and protective side, too. The Scientist is arrogant and aloof, but really just wants people to recognise his achievements. The Guard has a criminal past, but is fiercely loyal.
11bit Studios have done an incredible job with the Alters themselves, allowing them to react to your choices and outside stimuli in realistic, very human ways. As a result, they can be very unpredictable. You might expect them to react one way and they do something completely different. Early on The Alters encourages you to bond with them and grow fond with them, only so it can gut-punch you with tough moral choices later. You’ll need to settle disputes between them (or sometimes just stay out of it), and help them overcome the fact that everything they believe they know and feel is the manufactured result of you creating living tools to help you survive.
There’s a great deal of moral philosophising in The Alters. You are creating people with fully formed lives and memories that are very real to them, but which are entirely based on sophisticated computer simulations. They look to you for help and leadership, and don’t trust the company you work for, who seem to care more about the Rapidium than your life or the lives of your Alters. Each Alter has a story to investigate and “finish”, which will often deepen your bond and bring them out of their shell, while also teaching Jan a “Life Lesson”, which can affect his outlook on life going forward. I’ve actually no idea if it affects gameplay, but I’d like to think it did.
Perhaps it’s a slight failing that you won’t be able to create your fifth and sixth Alters until later in the game, and you’ll be much more attached to the ones you get earlier. The Technician is always first, and really if you’re not creating the Scientist second then you’re making the game incredibly hard as you need him to research new technology. And so these two automatically become the closest allies you have, and will grow and develop more than the others. In my playthrough I got the Refiner third, who is, for want of a better word, kind of adorable. But then I got the Doctor for his cooking skills and he was kind of dour throughout.
Finally I opted for the chilled-out Shrink and his psychedelic tea, and the rebellious Worker, who championed unions in his younger days and hates Ally Corp. If there’s a fault in The Alters, it’s that after Act 1 is over, I never really felt like I had time to chill and get to know my Alters. The game is pretty relentless on standard difficulty.
See, base management is the third tenet and it’s the one that ties the other two together. You need to maintain the modules in the base, which means you need resources, and to get resources you need to use your Alters. You have limited hours in the day before you’re tired, and tasks take 50% longer to complete. Stay up too late and become exhausted and Jan will sleep in, losing three precious hours of the following day. So you’ll need to assign Alters to jobs like crafting, cooking, mining, and repairing base damage, while you take care of things only Jan can do, like clearing out Anomalies and placing equipment that helps keep your base moving.
The planet you’re on has a very angry sun, you see, which has a strange solar cycle. As a result, the sunrise is a ticking clock that you need to outrun. If the sun rises on your position, it will cook the base and you’ll all die from radiation burn in moments. So the target is always to overcome whatever obstacle is barring your path, and then gather enough Organics to move the base before the sun comes up.
Typically you’ll have around 30 days in each Act, which seems a lot but really isn’t. Because amongst all the crafting and gathering, The Alters will throw catastrophes at you, some that affect your Alters, like illnesses or accidents, depression or rebellion, and some that affect the ship, like Magnetic Storms that can rage for more than a day and bombard you with radiation while draining your resources to make repair kits and radiation filters. The days can fly by in no time, particularly when Jan is working as this will fast forward the clock to make Jan move faster. A whole day can be gone in a few minutes this way.
Planning is essential, making sure you have enough suit batteries, drill cartridges for clearing rock walls, shields to defend you against dangerous anomalies, and enough gear to build new mining outposts to enable fast travel and mining. You’ll always need to get back to base before nightfall or suffer radiation burn, and it’s in the evening that you can interact with your Alters and play beer pong, or watch movies together. The movies, by the way, are mostly gold, taking the form of short sketches by a couple of creators called Chris & Jack. Some of them are genuinely funny, so I’d encourage you to watch a couple. Future Ex-Girlfriend and Mindwipe are brilliant.
Ultimately The Alters is a game about keeping your cool while all around you are losing theirs. It can become incredibly stressful at times, and sometimes there’s just no pleasing your Alters at all, no matter how you try. Or at least it seems that way. It only saves when you wake in the morning, so you can go back and replay whole days to try different outcomes or even create new Alters, locking your save games so they don’t get overridden. But even this way, you can’t see all of it.
What really hooked me on 11bit Studios’ survival sim was the Alters themselves. Each one is so interesting, and some of the horrible things that befall them – sometimes because of you – really make you feel bad. In fact, sometimes I felt that The Alters delighted just a little too much in making me feel like a bad person. But when the credits rolled on an ending that was happy not because it all worked out perfectly but because my choices had mattered, I felt supremely satisfied. I wanted to play again immediately, and try different options and meet different Alters.
If anything really let The Alters down for me though, it was the performance. Perhaps because it’s juggling so much at a time, the engine nearly fried itself over and over again. I experienced hard crashes to desktop, bugs that froze my Alters in place, or stuck Jan on a little jutting outcrop of rock and wouldn’t let me move. I had conversations layer on one another, repeated dialogue, and occasional game over screens that came out of nowhere and then didn’t happen when I replayed the day exactly the same. It was, at times, hard work, and I hope 11bit can patch some of the more egregious bugs.
Regardless, I absolutely loved every minute of The Alters. I loved the joy of the unknown, I loved getting to know an Alter, and I loved creating Modules that allowed me to interact with them, or watch them interact with each other. But most of all I really liked that 11bit Studios kept surprising me, kept hinting at something sinister within Ally Corp, and then gave me some good hard sci-fi in the final Act.
There were times when The Alters worked so hard I could see the seams, and sometimes the stitching threatened to come undone altogether, but despite it being a highly stressful game and despite the bugs, it’s the most unique and interesting survival-crafting sim I’ve ever played. Well written, well executed, and well worth your time, The Alters is a genuinely moving, compelling, and exciting game that delights in punishing you for the very real sin of being a fallible human.
