The Alters Review

Have you ever had a to-do list as long as your arm and wished there were two of you? Why stop at two? Three or four of you and you could really get some shit done. The Alters gets this, allowing you to spawn an army of yourself to survive life on a space base in the unforgiving wilds of a hostile alien planet. But a clone needn’t be just a bland worker bee doing your bidding, what could you learn about yourself by getting to know one and toil alongside them?

Thank God Roxanne is home

The Alters is the latest title from 11 Bit Studios, a development outfit best known for the superb This War of Mine, a bleak, gruelling, monochromatic survive-‘em-up that took elements of The Sims and dialled the post-war depression up to 11. The Alters shares much of the same DNA, but is considerably more expansive in scope – we’re talking a bigger base, larger explorable 3D environments, more people to take care of, more momentous choices (and mistakes) to make and a more explicit story to tell. It’s a significant departure in vibe from This War of Mine, having more than a few quirky moments of levity (the hilarious short films are an absolute must-watch) that certainly weren’t a feature of its spiritual predecessor, but just being bigger doesn’t always means better and some of the nuance and balance is unfortunately lost along the way.

The story begins with our intrepid space explorer Jan Dolski’s crash landing on an alien planet as part of a mining expedition for Ally Corp. Ally Corp are desperate to get their hands on an element called Rapidium (in the same part of the periodic table as Vibranium and Unobtainium), which among other whacky properties appears to encourage rapid growth of organic lifeforms. The planet you’ve unceremoniously crashed upon is apparently rich with sweet sweet Rapidium, and as the lone survivor of the crash landing it’s up to you to establish a base, figure out how to not have the planet kill you and uncover Ally Corp’s real ambitions behind procuring the stuff. Certainly not a task you can complete all on your lonesome…

Great, big, beautiful wheel

Early on in the piece you’ll discover the base is equipped with a quantum computer, which as well as being able to run DOOM (probably), also allows you to summon clones of yourself drawn from branching paths of your life. The OG Jan Dolski is a lowly builder who only joined the expedition after a series of relatively poor life choices, but what if he’d stayed in school and become a gifted scientist? What if he had had the courage to intervene in a street fight and been inspired by a street doctor and eventually become a healer himself? The titular Alters that Jan spawns all believe themselves to be Jan Dolski in body and soul but manifest like fragments of his psyche, with their own temperaments and emotional baggage that you’ll have to navigate so everyone can get along. This is not to mention the quandary of whether cloning fully sentient beings from unrealised quantum states of your past life is morally a great thing to be doing.

There are a few different wrinkles to the gameplay, but the heart and soul of the experience is your giant modular base in the shape of a huge wheel. You’ll gather resources from the planet surface (or even better get your Alters to do it for you) to build more sections in your mighty space wheel, as well as craft objects to protect it and connect it to the planet surface. The base is represented in a 2.5D-style perspective (which will be instantly familiar to TWOM veterans) where you can travel to connected sections of your base to perform various tasks (like building items in the workshop, growing food or cooking a meal or two). All of these tasks can also be assigned to your Alters, and this is often the best course of action as you’ll want to be frequently venturing outside the base to uncover resources and establish mining outposts in the vast 3D surrounds to keep the resources flowing.

Survival kumbuya

…there’s an omnipresent feeling of never quite having enough to keep everything running smoothly and the sense that the next disaster that tips the balance against you may not be far away

Once you get the basic cadence of surviving and (sort of) thriving, the game achieves a really nice rhythm that is tense and addicting. As the entire thing is in real time (outside of the management menu), you’ll want to make every second (which is an in-game minute) count. Alters only work between certain hours, and will work fewer hours if they’re unhappy, and you yourself can only work so much too. It’s very much a sci-fi farming sim, but this is no Animal Crossing in space however – there’s an omnipresent feeling of never quite having enough to keep everything running smoothly and the sense that the next disaster that tips the balance against you may not be far away. Things like magnetic storms will test your base maintenance skills and resources, and the ever present danger of night radiation and potential violent heat death as the sun approaches you ensures you won’t get too comfortable in one spot for too long.

Much like TWOM, The Alters is a game of choices, and in a cruel twist it can often be difficult to tell how they will pan out. I reached a point in the second act where I had a crew humming along, my scientist smashing out quality research and new gadgets, mining outposts spewing out resources and a fully functioning beer pong table – life was good, I felt I had gotten ahead of the curve. All it took however was one monumental mistake where I misjudged how my Alters would react and I ended up limping into the third act with a crew diminished greatly in both number and morale, next to no resources, and my base in shambles (beer pong table thankfully intact). It’s testament to the talent of 11 bit Studios that this gut-punch moment truly had me regretting my short-sightedness, and I spent the first part of the third act desperately braving dangers and taking huge risks to try and make things right. I only partially succeeded, achieving an ending which I thought did as much justice to my Alters as I could salvage, but until I play through again I will never know what might have been, and that’s a powerful thing to weave into a game.

In space no one can hear you drugs

There are several niggling issues that I feel are a by-product of the game’s expanded scope that do sour the experience. By having a larger and more complex base, no matter how well you design it with corridors and elevators between sections, navigating is generally painful. You’ll want to continually converse with your Alters to complete sidequests or just make sure they’re happy, and they can be anywhere in the ship, so chasing the bastards down once your base has grown makes you wish you had never spawned them. The view is far too zoomed in, which is nice when admiring the cool environmental detail, but a nightmare to traverse with no in-base fast travel. You’ll be constantly opening the map to find your free-roaming Alters (all while the clock ticks), and the elevators you use that connect everything are extremely finicky in how they are controlled, becoming a source of frustration throughout the entire experience. Also, base maintenance is poorly explained and not well represented visually, and you may not realise its full importance until it suddenly becomes a massive issue during a pivotal moment. A litany of spelling mistakes, random bits of untranslated French (from a Polish studio?), occasional tonal whiplash when conversing with your Alters and a third act that fizzles out and loses some of the desperate survival tone also take the experience down a few notches, but not enough to completely derail it.

Final Thoughts

The Alters is an ambitious survive-‘em-up that takes what 11 bit Studios knows and reaches for the stars. It’s largely a successful expansion of the studio’s previously conceived ideas and mechanics, with an enjoyable narrative shaped by your choices and an overall sense of desperation punctuated with quirky humour and oddball characters. Getting to know your Alters and the other characters and corporations at the heart of this disastrous space mission is a profound and engaging experience that is easily recommended to anyone who enjoys a little bit of stressful resource management. Some frustrations in the pace and navigation and lack of polish in the dialogue only slightly mar what is otherwise a stellar journey into the unknown, and while it probably won’t sit with me as long as TWOM, my time with Jan Dolski’s multitudes did make me ponder the nature of choice and consequence. Also, if you’re listening, I’m sorry Jan Technician. You were my first Alter and I did you wrong, hopefully I did enough to earn your forgiveness.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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