The Alters Review - Living With Myselves

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The survival genre has always felt like a comfortable mold many developers use. Not in a bad way. Its foundations are so strong that creating something solid with a few tweaks mostly pays off. Yet, after some time, all of these games feel quite similar. The Alters, however, completely breaks the mold to create the decade’s most unique, impactful, unforgettable, and thought-provoking survival game yet. It perfectly combines the strong aspects of survival crafting and delivers an unmatched narrative full of game-altering choices.

Becoming Jan Dolski

We’re all used to the usual survival scenario of being stranded on an island, forest, or a post-apocalyptic civilization with no one around us. In that regard, The Alters is the same. You’re Jan Dolski, a crew member of Project Dolly, an expedition on its way to uncover a mysterious substance that could help humanity. Sadly, the trip goes awry, and everyone onboard the ship dies, except for Jan. With no one around to help him, what’s the best course of action? You guessed it, creating alternate copies of yourself.

The Alters embraces the “what if” scenario we live with daily. We often think, “What if I had done this or that?” Sometimes, we ask that question for the most insignificant things, like a choice of food or clothing. But there are times when we also ask about how our life would be if we had studied at a different school, stood up to that bully who picked on us, and so on. The Alters makes these “what if” scenarios come to life, or rather, creates the person who lived in those branching paths.

Beyond the narrative repercussions of creating an Alter, it has a lot of impact on your gameplay. Initially, Jan has to run a base on his own. However, he’s only a builder. He has no knowledge of medicine, repairs, or even cooking. But do you know who does? His Alters. After obtaining Rapidium, the game’s most important substance, you can look inside the base’s Quantum Computer, which contains all of Jan’s DNA and branching paths. Do you require a miner? Then, look for the path where Jan worked in the mines and create Jan Miner. Do you need a doctor? Select the branching path where he studied medicine, and so on.

Slowly, you’ll start building your army of Jans, but that’s where the actual work begins. While they’ll help you all around the base, with some performing better in specific areas, you’ll have to watch out for everyone’s moods, likes, dislikes, complete a few requests, and even deny some.

Learning From Myself

The gameplay loop of The Alters relies on two solid mechanics: base and Alter management, and exploration. First, the base. It works like Fallout Shelter, where you have many modules you can connect to in a Tetris-like grid. You can build different rooms, ranging from storage expansions to an infirmary, a greenhouse, and more.

However, your Alters will support you and simultaneously give you trouble inside the base. These alternate versions of Jan are here to do specific tasks. They can cook faster, heal other Alters, repair the ship, grow crops, etc. However, they also have their needs. For instance, the Refiner appreciates exercise and a healthy life. To make him happy, you’ll have to build a gym. The Technician likes to have a place to wind down and play some beer pong with the crew (and yes, that’s an actual playable mini-game), so having a social room is a good idea.

You’ll often be bombarded with several requests from your Alters, and while most of them are easy to solve, a few will challenge you when picking one thing or the other, but I’ll delve into that further. Overall, managing the base and your Alters is challenging yet rewarding. If you fulfill everyone’s requests, you might even unlock new teaching you can use in conversation. For instance, helping the Scientist will teach the original Jan to be pragmatic. In a future conversation, you might get a new dialog option you solve using the Pragmatism you learned from your Alter.

Breaking the Survival Mold

With the base and Alter management out of the way, it is time to move to the more hands-on survival aspects. In a way, The Alters follows many of the genre’s staples, albeit with a sprinkle of uniqueness. For instance, instead of crafting dozens of tools with limited durability, Jan goes to the planet’s surface to place probes and scan the area to find a deposit. Once he finds one, he puts down an extractor and tasks an Alter to operate it. The trick here is connecting the extractor with pylons that reach the base, which leads to many environmental puzzles I liked.

At first, connecting extractors will be the easiest thing in the world. As you progress through the game’s three acts, however, you’ll notice how everything becomes an environmental puzzle. You need to craft new pylons, open new paths with tools, and look for ways to pass those wires that will eventually reach your base.

While that covers the gathering part of things, the exploration is yet another critical part. The Alters has three semi-open areas, one per act. Each of them has its own traversal challenges. In some, you can just climb easily to reach a new spot and plop down your machines. However, in other areas, you need new equipment that you can only craft after your Scientist researches it. Power management is another vital aspect. Your suit has power charges that you can spend on actions such as climbing with the grappling hook.

Furthermore, there are many hazards on the planet, mainly the anomalies. These invisible floating “enemies” will fill you with radiation and often block many paths. You can craft one item to defeat them and even harvest them to refine them inside your base. Exploration was definetely a welcome surprise with the added challenge of a solar storm approaching the planet. Every time you wake up, you’ll see a counter warning you about the sun’s distance from where you are. The game encourages you to perform every task fast to move on to the next area and outrun your impending doom.

Overall, The Alters‘ survival formula is one of the most refreshing I’ve seen in a while. It may not feature an open world full of caves and enemies. Yet, its more cohesive and compact approach feels more impactful and engaging. Some players might feel it is not too deep, but it is, especially since The Alters is designed to be played more than once. You won’t see everything in one playthrough. Doing subsequent runs is encouraged if you want to discover every secret on the planet or learn the story of every Alter you can create.

Our Branching Paths

Often, many games include dialogue options that are kind of cookie-cutter and superficial. You get these in-depth conversations with dozens of options to pick from, and nothing leads to anything. However, The Alters features some of the most difficult choices in any narrative-driven game, and I dare say some of them reach Mass Effect levels.

Without going into spoiler territory, something happens inside the base, putting everyone in danger. There are two solutions to this problem, but everyone is torn between these two. Picking either of them will anger a few members of your crew and bring game-changing consequences. When I reached the game’s third act, I was blown away by all the chaos I had caused. I could’ve reloaded a save to fix things, but I wanted to see how my decisions would pay off, which is another key theme of The Alters: living with the choices you make.

As I finished my first playthrough, I realized something. In games with dialogue systems and seemingly multi-option paths, most of them give you the illusion of choice. They trick you into thinking one of your decisions will affect the game when it doesn’t. The Alters, however, does the opposite. It tricks you into thinking the dialogues have no impact and then slaps you in the face with the consequences. I never thought that one simple dialogue choice I picked during the first act would change how the last portion of the game would play, but that’s exactly what happened.

Furthermore, if you plan to play this game more than once, it will show you your previous choices. This function makes selecting new paths much easier, and something I highly recommend you do. You’ll soon realize how much the plot can change without having a specific Alter. Sadly, I didn’t create all of them and missed a lot during my first playthrough. Yet, that’s what makes The Alters so unique. I would never see myself restarting a survival game unless it was for a 1.0 release or joining a new server. In those games that follow the same mold, the experience is too similar; you even know what to do step by step. Here, every run will be different depending on the decisions you make.

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience

I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing survival games, but not one comes close to what The Alters is. The Alters delivers the most thought-provoking narrative I’ve ever experienced in the genre while also providing a solid survival-crafting gameplay loop. It also brings some of the most impactful dialogue choices ever that change the game completely, unlike the so-called modern RPGs that only offer one or two scenes with slight variations.

While it isn’t without its issues, like visual glitches and Jan getting stuck in some places, The Alters is definitely one of the year’s best games so far. 11 Bit Studio has once again raised the bar on the survival landscape, proving that it can bring even more emotional storytelling with engaging survival mechanics, all mixed into one of the most unforgettable gaming experiences of the last decade.

The Alters (PC Reviewed)

10 Remarkable!

The Alters delivers the most thought-provoking narrative in the survival genre, while also providing an excellent gameplay loop that encourages replayability.