The Alters achieves something tense and new by merging strategy base-building with third-person exploration and a sci-fi story about cloning yourself. But repetition and complicated busywork mar the overall effect.
I’ve got a problem: I crash-landed on a strange alien planet and I’m the only one from my crew who survived. I found the large tyre-shaped base I was looking for – and by large I mean ginormous; it’s the height of a tower – but in order to get it rolling again, and I do mean literally rolling, I’m going to need help. I need more pairs of hands. I need people to help me mine resources and make food and protect the base against radiation, because if I don’t get it moving, the soon-to-be-rising sun will roast me. Really I have no option: I need to clone myself.
The Alters reviewDeveloper: 11 bit StudiosPublisher: 11 bit StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now PC (Steam, GOG, Epic), PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox Series S/X and GamePass
This is the set-up for The Alters, the new game from Polish developer 11 bit Studios, which has built a reputation for lacing base-building strategy games with tricky moral dilemmas and dark subject matter. In This War of Mine, it was managing a base of civilians living in a war zone; in Frostpunk, it was establishing the last city on a frozen Earth. Here in The Alters, it’s creating clones in order to get yourself home, and again the question is: how far are you willing to go in order to survive?
The central conceit in The Alters is cloning, then. On board your space-age tyre-shaped base is a Quantum Computer, which is capable of looking through the memories of someone’s life and then marking points on a timeline where it could have changed – gone a different way. In this case, the life is Jan Dolksi’s, a fairly unremarkable person who signed up for an experimental mission to space, in a last ditch attempt at some glory. It’s his timeline we select and create alternate versions of him from.
To begin with this is a guided decision but you have a freer choice over which Jan to create later on. Initially, we’re guided towards a moment in Jan’s life where, at 19 years old, he decided to move away from home, from a violent father, and in doing so leave his mother alone, which is something he feels enormously guilty about. What would have happened if he hadn’t moved away? Now, finally, he can find out, by creating the clone who lived that path: Technician Jan – there’s always a mechanical skill associated with a new Jan, in this case the ability to repair things quickly. There’s a doctor Jan, a scientist Jan, a botanist Jan, and a few more, and each has a distinct personality and a different lived experience, based on decisions of their own. It’s a minor marvel how actor Alex Jordan has managed several appreciably different performances of the same character for the game. Technician Jan selected, then, we head to the Womb module in the base to wait for him to quick-grow.