11 Bit Studios, known for creating games that require tough decisions, has once again delivered with The Alters. This game combines a straightforward survival experience with management systems centered around difficult choices. Unlike their previous works where your decisions affect other people, in The Alters, you’ll face the consequences of your actions against various versions of yourself. The goal is to survive and keep a small group of your clones content. It’s an interesting concept that maintains the studio’s distinctive style, although some survival elements occasionally interfere with the gameplay.
In this game, you take on the role of Jan Dolski, who finds himself stranded on an alien shore, light-years away from his home planet. The environment around you is bleak and foreboding, with towering red smoke stacks and jagged lightning flashes casting eerie light on your path towards your sole sanctuary – a colossal wheel with its base suspended within it. You’re not accompanied by any other beings, and returning home will necessitate collecting an abundance of resources. This is accomplished by locating resource deposits in the vicinity, constructing a series of pylons as you venture outwards from safety, and employing them to transport resources back.
To prosper and increase your chances of returning home, you must continuously gather essential elements like metals, minerals, and organic materials. These resources will help you enhance tools, expand your settlement, and cultivate food. Despite the planet being unfamiliar, it offers what’s necessary for your survival. However, one thing that’s scarce is time. With each passing day, sunrise approaches, and exposure to its intensely radioactive light could be disastrous.
Fortunately, you’re enclosed by a mysterious mineral called Rapidium, which aids in speeding up the growth of living cells. This allows you to replicate yourself using it, increasing your chances of making it back home. Technically, creating duplicates (or ‘alters’) is crucial for your survival. In The Alters game, each action you perform takes a specific duration to finish, and time seems to speed up when you press a button to do tasks like mining, cooking, repairing, etc. However, there are only a fixed number of hours in a day, and as Jan gets tired, these tasks take more and more time to accomplish.
Since it’s impractical for one person to handle everything, your assistants are designed to aid you. You can assign one assistant to oversee the operations at an organic mine during a shift, while another focuses on crafting essential tools and radiation shields in the workshop throughout the day. This leaves you free to delve deeper into finding richer resource deposits, examining enigmatic alien activity, and seeking answers to overcome each barrier that hinders our mobile base from advancing further.
The Alters concept posits that minor choices can significantly shape your life’s course, and offers an opportunity to explore this notion by generating duplicates of the character known as Jan. Each duplicate has a unique specialty, making them superior at various tasks compared to the original Jan. For instance, miner Jan excels in resource gathering, while technician Jan repairs base modules quicker than anyone else. All characters are voiced by the same actor as the original Jan, maintaining a balanced level of seriousness and humor within the given context. Voice acting plays a crucial role in conveying critical story moments through static scenes, and it’s captivating throughout.
Each of your personas is capable of handling most jobs, yet there are certain roles that require a specialist. For instance, Researcher Jan specializes in investigating a wide range of equipment and upgrades for your base, which become increasingly crucial as your resource demands surpass conventional production methods. Managing daily tasks effectively is important to navigate through challenging terrains like rivers of lava or gravity distortions, as they require specialized tools and substantial resources. Efficient management helps you progress before the next day ends, preventing a premature end to your journey.
If only your creations, or alters as you call them, didn’t sometimes cause friction. Despite their usefulness, they often question the choices you make that deviated your life from what their lives could have been, while also questioning the decisions you make to keep everyone alive. They all grasp the uncertainty of their fate once they help you achieve your mission to return home, making it necessary to skillfully manage their cooperation. Their personalities determine whether they react positively to comfort or pressure, while their moods decide how long they’ll work each day. It’s unrealistic to keep everyone content all the time, so the tension in The Alters arises from the difficult decisions you must make to balance survival and the well-being of your workforce.
As a gamer, I find the tales spun from the intense struggle between my crew’s demands and the mission objectives to be the most gripping stories The Alters has to provide. Throughout these journeys, there are tiny, persistent hurdles that precede grand, heart-stopping victories at the end of each act. Often, success hinges on a few crucial hours, making each advance feel like a true achievement.
However, there are times when past decisions come back to haunt me as I approach the climax. Mismanaged days can lead to a predicament from which there is no recovery, forcing me to reload my saves and waste some precious time. This can be frustrating, but it does make every win feel earned, especially after navigating through so many tough decisions and intricate management.
It’s important to note that every moment in The Alters isn’t always exciting. There will be periods where you find yourself at a workbench or mining station, pressing a button repeatedly while time passes as you finish tasks that no alter of yours could handle for you. Exploration on the planet’s surface is necessary to discover new locations for mining stations, but pinpointing the precise spots for placement can be tiresome, involving frustrating minigames that seem intentionally designed to consume your time. Additionally, surface exploration is heavily regulated by your spacesuit’s battery life, necessitating careful planning of your exploration, as you must frequently return to base or travel between mining stations to recharge your suit.
Exploring the surface in The Alters comes with an added challenge: its light combat. The terrain surrounding your base is teeming with elusive adversaries, some of which emit radiation and can harm you if you cross their path, while others possess time-dilating abilities and steal valuable hours from your day. Initially, these enemies are manageable, but as you advance, they grow more aggressive and hazardous, capable of knocking you out with a single mistake.
You can eradicate enemies using a weapon that emits light and destroys orbs at their cores, making subsequent journeys less treacherous. However, this weapon shares the same battery system as your movement on the surface, creating a sense of limitation and adding another layer of stress to exploration. The combination of resource management and time constraints, coupled with this battery management during exploration, feels harsh and discouraging rather than engaging and rewarding.
In The Alters, you grapple with intriguing dilemmas as you create and coexist with multiple versions of yourself. This game masterfully combines heart-pounding moments and intense emotional and mechanical tension by carefully stacking its management systems. It offers thrilling victories and unforgettable encounters, but can get repetitive at times due to excessive focus on a single resource for exploration, which can be frustrating. However, the journey of Jan Dolski, striving to return home, promises a unique experience for every player, making it a harrowing adventure that will linger in my memory for some time.
Read More
2025-06-13 20:39