The Alters Review – Mind Blowing, Life Altering Survival

The Alters Review

I don’t know if the folks at 11 bit studios are fun to grab a beer with. If they’re anything like the games they make, it might make for a melancholic hang. This War of Mine and the Frostpunk games are excellent, but not necessarily joyous meditations on humanity. The Alters, 11 bit’s new game, flows from the same well, but has a far more emotionally nuanced, complex and balanced story and characters. Well, character.

Survive and Build

That’s all as clear as mud, right? If I were being reductionist, I would say that The Alters is a survival game. You play as Jan Dolski, the only survivor of a crash-landed mining crew. They’ve been sent to an inhospitable planet to gather a new miracle element called Rapidium. Post-crash, there’s just you and a mobile, wheel-shaped base that’s in need of repair and expansion. Because Jan is going to survive fulfill the mission. What else can he do while he waits for rescue?

The planet itself is an entirely believable conception, dark and deadly with radiation, magnetic storms and hazardous who-knows-what anomalies. It’s 180 degrees from those day-glow cartoon planets in games like No Man’s Sky. It’s immediately terrifying, fascinating and beautifully rendered.

On one hand, the survival/crafting/building loop in The Alters is pretty standard stuff. Jan has to make excursions from his home to find materials that he can use to expand and protect the base. There are technologies to research and build, and new resources to analyze. Both day and night have their own particular hazards, and Jan is always watching the clock. Every journey outside is filled with tension and often, moments of discovery. If The Alters were simply a build-and-survive game, it would be a very good one, well balanced between fiddly complexity and being too simple.

Group Psychology

In a sense, the entire survival game structure is in service of an entirely different, and very surprising social simulation. Here’s the hook. Sole survivor Jan can’t complete all the survival and building tasks alone. He needs a crew. So he literally looks to himself. Using Rapidium and a quantum computer, Jan is able to clone copies of himself from different points on his life’s trajectory. We all make decisions — sometimes without knowing it — where the course of our lives changed direction. Maybe we could have dropped out of school and gone into a trade. Or majored in psychology instead of chemistry. We have hidden inflection points all the time, and they generate ripples down the lines of our lives.

Jan’s clones come from these intersections and represent him as specialists of one kind or another. So there’s Jan the Mechanic, Jan the Researcher, and Jan the Janitor, just for example. Each clone is both the same person and sometimes wildly different. They all arrive disoriented and sometimes unhappy. Each Jan semi-copy has their own variation on Original Jan’s personality. Some are surly, others are good-natured. The clone Jans gossip, fight, and cooperate by turns. They each have particular needs and desires that are sometimes at odds with Jan. The original Jan.

In order to manage and grow the base, player Jan has to be a combination of psychologist, coach, manager, and buddy. All the Jans share a common origin, but depending on where they come from in Jan’s timeline, they have different values and need to be understood and managed. Quite often, The Alters feels like a version of The Sims, but one in which the characters are motivated by more complex desires than food, sleep, toilets, and WooHoo.

Purpose and Direction

It would be very easy for The Alters to slide off the rails by being too tedious and complex. The Alters’ biggest home run might be the way it balances all its disparate elements and doesn’t allow anything to become too opaque or bog down the pacing. The game does an excellent job of coaching the player through each mechanic in a way that feels pretty organic. To balance the surprising emergent gameplay that arises from the unpredictable Jans, the player is given a logical progression of specific tasks. Some players might chafe against the moments of box-checking and mundane jobs. Coming from other 11 bit studios games, they might also notice that the crafting and building aspects are a bit streamlined and not quite as layered.

On the whole, I loved the look of The Alters. As mentioned, the planet and its weather and lighting effects are authentically sci-fi in the best possible way. The various Jans look immediately identifiable, too. The writing and voice acting are on par with the graphics, with the exception of some pretty bad lip syncing. A few outside-the-ship animations are a few frames short of smooth. Stellar voice work and environmental audio aside, the music score is a bit disappointing. Although it perfectly fits the lonely tone of the game, it consists mostly of synth washes and fragments of melody. It’s more generic than the game deserves.

Finally, A Surprise

All games build on or look back at what’s come before. The Alters makes a delicious stew out of familiar ingredients, both from other 11 bit studios games and popular genres. Taking survival and building mechanics and adding a complex layer of social simulation isn’t entirely foreign to this developer, but The Alters feels genuinely original, and that’s a bit miraculous in an industry full of sequels and remakes. Ironically, while the game might be about clones, The Alters is anything but a copy of something else.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***