The Alters plays like a mix of XCOM 2’s base building, The Sims’ personal needs management, and a third-person survival adventure.
This sci-fi game begins with a ship crashlanding on a distant planet, leaving one survivor: Jan Dolski. During the day, you explore and gather resources outside the base to improve it. At night, you hide from radiation and unwind with hilarious live-action movies or some beer pong.
If you’ve played 11 Bit Studios’ other games like This War of Mine or Frostpunk, the merging of survival and base-building will be familiar to you. But what sets The Alters apart from 11 Bit’s previous outings is its high focus on interpersonal drama.
To survive, Jan uses a quantum computer and some questionable science to make clones of himself with divergent life paths, known as Alters. These variants went left when he went right, intervened when he ignored, zigged when he zagged.
Each playthrough, you’ll be able to choose who you create. Doctor, botanist, maybe the guard or miner? You’ll always need the technician and scientist for story purposes, but everyone else is your decision.
The clones have different personalities and values, and even chat or do activities together when you haven’t got them assigned to a workstation, mining metals, or crafting radiation shields.
The story itself is mostly told through static conversations with Alters or via phone calls to Earth. The presentation is lacking, but the message itself is fantastic; an insightful meta commentary on how we as people and gamers ruminate on our past choices instead of moving forward with them. Anyone who’s reloaded an old save file to select a different dialogue option will relate strongly and learn a thing or two.
Overall, the game is gorgeous. Stunning sci-fi vistas are everywhere in the multiple environments you’ll wander during the 30ish-hour story. Each in-game minute is a real-world second, and the constant march of time pushes you to overcome challenging obstacles and make tough choices.
The Alters is 11 Bit Studios’ magnum opus; a tense, thrilling, thoughtful game that makes you question what kind of person you want to be.