Jan Dolski is an ordinary crewman aboard an AllyCorp spacecraft headed to a hostile planet circling the star Gliese 3804. The planet is the only known source of Rapidium, a substance with time-bending properties, allowing for the rapid growth of organic material, such allowing a farm to produce a year's worth of food in a day, a vital technology for a resource-depleted Earth. But an accident kills the entire crew apart from Jan, leaving him alone. Fortunately, a large mobile base has survived the arrival and Jan is able to get it working. He needs more crew...and the base has the capability to clone human life, and Rapidium can mature it to adulthood in hours. Jan, reluctantly, has to create duplicates of himself to crew the base and guide it to a recovery location, whilst convincing an unsympathetic corporation to send a rescue party...for a price.
The Alters is the latest game from 11 Bit Studios, the Polish company behind This War of Mine and the seminal survival city-builder Frostpunk. The Alters at first feels like it's right in their wheelhouse, being a tense survival game with you managing resources, expanding your base and making tough decisions on who lives and who dies, in service of the "the greater good" (whatever that means). But The Alters differs significantly in its presentation: this is an over-the-shoulder third person game with exploration, combat and survival mechanics. This results in a very unique-feeling game that feels like a blend of Subnautica, Frostpunk, XCOM, Fallout Shelter and, er, Alan Wake (there's some anomalies that have to be illuminated by a UV torch and then destroyed).
The game is divided into a prologue and three acts. The game upfronts the survival elements, with you exploring the area around your base, gathering resources and using those resources to build new rooms in the base, geared towards your survival (a captain's cabin, kitchen, greenhouse, infirmary, storage etc) or the expansion of the base (workshop, laboratory, refinery). A familiar survival chain kicks in as you gather resources to expand the base, and build tools and upgrades to allow you to explore further (getting a grapple gun to rappel up sheer rock faces to reach hitherto inaccessible areas, or use a mining laser to blast aside rockfalls). Success begets success. However, you also need to grow food, cook the food in a meal and sleep. You need to get enough sleep to be good for work the next day; you can exhaust yourself if not careful and end up wasting half the next day in bed. At first it's doable, but quickly the number of tasks that need to be done simultaneously starts building up.
Where the title kicks in is when you realise you can't do this alone and, helped by dubious advice via intermittent contact with Earth, you start cloning yourself. Each "Alter" is genetically identical to you but the base's quantum computer is able to go back to decisions your made in your life and simulate alternate life choices, that leads to your "Alters" becoming specialised in alternate tasks: science, mining, refining, medicine, botany and so forth. This is great, but comes at the cost of each Alter having a different psychology. You need to keep your Alters happy, as they are all dealing with understandable existential crises, but what will cheer up one Alter will anger another, forcing you to stay on your toes as you work out how to keep them all sweet. Once Alters are in circulation, you can assign them to different jobs, freeing you up to focus on other tasks (usually physically exploring each region and building mining and supply line pylons).
At any time you have to engage with multiple tasks, some of which you can delegate but most you have to tackle personally. There's a main story mission to follow, which requires a chain of research and construction projects, but also side-quests related to keeping your Alters happy. It may be tempting to say this is unnecessary in the face of impending doom and focus on the essentials, but make your Alters too angry or unhappy and they can either push themselves too hard and get themselves killed, or they can rebel and leave. Adding to the juggling act is that you can only stay in each area for a limited period of time before the sun rises and floods the area with lethal radiation, introducing a ticking clock you have to bear in mind. To be honest, the ticking clock element is nowhere near as punishing as it sounds; I usually completed each area with 3-4 days to spare, and in fact stayed on for a bit longer than necessary to maximise resources in each area before taking off.
This may sound tricky, like juggling lions, but in actuality it's pretty straightforward. You still have to prioritise tasks, but the game's slick UI gives you a lot of options to ease tasks (like ensuring you always have a set amount of food or useable tools constructed before doing anything else for the day). Frostpunk often seemed to require you to fail completely as a learning tool before playing again and perhaps winning. However, this is down to the respective games' lengths: each Frostpunk scenario can be played from start to finish in 3-4 hours, so failure and restarting is not a major problem. The Alters takes about 20 hours per run, and completely failing at, say, around hour 18 would be far more annoying, so the game has to go at least a bit easier on you (until you decide to ratchet up the difficulty level yourself). It's much easier to recover from apparent fail-states in The Alters.
Even when you complete a run, there's compelling reasons to try another. There's a whole bunch of different endings depending on the various factions you can side with, and the steps you take to ensure your Alters' survival. It's also impossible to unlock every type of Alter in one run. At least two are required to see the other characters you don't see in the first playthrough, which can result in a very different experience.
Graphically, the game is very impressive, with a nice use of Unreal Engine 5. There are some oddities and hints of un-optimisation: some areas can load a bit too slowly if you turn around too quickly, and the game seems more punishing on the graphics card and temps than better-looking and busier open-world games. There's also telltale signs that the 3rd-person exploration mode is the first time that 11 Bit has done anything like this. Your character can get caught on scenery and ends up running on the spot a bit too easily, and sometimes you can get stuck on top of rocks and have to awkwardly find the pixel-perfect way to get back off again (the absence of a jump button gets annoying after a while). The music is excellent, if not quite as stunning as Frostpunk's, and sound cues are very atmospheric.
The base view, which recalls XCOM's "antfarm" approach, or Fallout Shelter, is splendid, and it can be fun swapping room arrangements around to optimise travel routes or just because it looks cool. The rooms are packed with fun, tiny details (your Alters might get bored and start playing Frostpunk or Frostpunk 2 in the entertainment room). The game is also forgiving in that you can assign Alters to different rooms and set up production lists from anywhere in the game world (even out in the wilderness). You also don't need to return to base to pick up new equipment that your Alters build for you, it just becomes immediately available.
The Alters is not flawless. A few moments in the game hinge on single dialogue choices, and these are not as instinctively obvious as I think the game thinks they are. A bigger problem is the game's take on combat. The surface of the planet is strewn with gravity anomalies, some of which can be drawn to you and irradiate you. Destroying these requires you to illuminate them with UV lights and then detonating them with a blast of energy (a bit like Alan Wake using his torch and gun). At first this is fun, but in the last area, which throws half a dozen variant anomalies at you continuously, this becomes a bit tedious. Also, whilst the psychology of dealing with your Alters' problems is mostly well-done, there are a few moments when your Alters will act in a way that's completely unreasonable and is basically committing suicide, that just doesn't feel plausible. Still, maybe that's the point.
The Alters (****½) is the world's first psychological thriller/city builder/base builder/survival/action/strategy game. Blending genres like this could have resulted in a mess but instead results in a tense, rich, compelling gaming experience that consistently engaging, with a strong amount of replayability. I haven't even mentioned the actual live-action short films you can watch in the base's cinema, the subplot with different people back home feuding and trying to enlist you as an ally, or the pet sheep that lives on the base. It confirms 11 Bit's status as one of the most interesting game development studios out there. Thoroughly recommended.
The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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