The Alters review — No man is an island, entire of himself

How much are we as people the product of our decisions?  Choosing to play in a band and bailing out on college might give you a completely different life experience than knuckling down and grinding out a career as a research scientist.  Sure, you’re the same person, but these moment-to-moment decisions that lead you from here to there shape you. Not only does it shape you, but how you react to the world around you. Now imagine a scenario where you’d have to put those two versions of you together.  Can they cooperate?  Would their life experiences make them more or less compatible to accomplish something in a time of crisis?  These and far more complex and difficult questions that you’ll answer in The Alters, and let me promise you this up front – this game is going to challenge what you think you know about yourself in ways few games ever could.  

In The Alters you play as Jan Dolski, a member of a group of scientists and builders sent to find a mysterious substance called Rapidium. Jan wakes from hypersleep and quickly realizes he’s no longer aboard his ship.  His pod has crash landed on an alien world, and he’s all alone.  Stumbling free of his capsule, he realizes that the radiation in this place is at lethal levels and rushes to find the mobile base that has emergency deployed to the surface.  On the way to it he finds the capsules of the rest of the crew – they’re all dead.  Alone, Jan is now tasked with trying to find his way home without resources, expertise, or much time.  The one thing he does have, he soon discovers, is what they all died to find – Rapidium.

Rapidium can be used for a number of things, but at its core it’s an accelerator.  After restoring communication with the team back on Earth, one of them suggests you use a room called “The Womb” to try something called “Branching”.  Branching looks at the sum of your memories, finds the core moments, and then gives a window into what would happen if that moment went another way.  If you choose path A, you might become a research scientist.  Choose path B and you might become a technician, botanist, guard, doctor, miner, refiner, or worker.   There are more possibilities, but I leave you to discover those.  Choosing this new branch and utilizing Rapidium to accelerate the growth of the genetic material, you’ll bring forth an Alter. More than a clone, these alternate versions of yourself have effectively lived an entire life of experiences, training, and choices – or at least in their head they have.  If you can convince this new version of yourself to help you, you just might survive this ordeal.

Everyone wakes up confused coming out of the womb, as you’d expect.  Answering some basic questions reveals thought clouds about their overall mental state.  Maybe your answers allay their fears, or maybe they make them worse – either way, you’ll need their help and convincing them of the urgency is key.  The sun on this planet will destroy anything it touches, even your base, so getting it moving and keeping it in motion is key to survival.  That threat is known, but it’s far from the only threat you’ll face.  This is where my description of the overarching story ends.  Not only will it be different for you, based on your own choices, but it would ruin some absolutely magnificent storytelling.  Go forth and make good decisions.

The Alters is, at its core, the combination of a few types of games living under one roof.  The base itself is highly modular, with different rooms having functions.  Airlock, Kitchen, Dormitory, Research Lab, Command Center, and Communications, just to name a few. That portion plays very similarly to games like Fallout Shelter.  Carefully using your limited resources to solve problems, construct rooms when needed, and otherwise balance the needs of you and your alters against the emerging challenges of the mission. Outside the base, however, is a different matter entirely.

Heading out the airlock deposits you onto a hostile alien world.  You’ll need to locate sources of food, minerals, metals, and of course, Rapidium.  Your base is equipped with the gear necessary to turn these elements into food and equipment (albeit with some elbow grease of your own), but you’ll need to find those things first.   Searching the ground with ground penetrating radar-equipped pylons reveals a topographical subsurface map, showing where you can drop a drill to pull deep veins of raw materials.  Sure, there are small pockets of materials you can pick up in the environment, and shallow veins you can mine by hand, but pulling power and placing a drill is your key to survival.  Somebody has to work those drills, and that’s where we’re back to your Alters.

Each Alter you bring to life will have different skillsets, and there are a limited number of slots for them, so you’ll have to choose wisely.  People’s roles, how strictly they can stick to them, and who you need most to accomplish your mission can be a challenging decision, as can having to send them out into dangerous radiation, knowing that it will likely burn them or make them sick. How does the guy react when he’s the only one you send out to suffer for days at a time?  Does that make him feel more crucial to the survival of the crew, or do they feel expendable?  Each one of your team reacts to pressure and adversity differently, and meeting those needs is the push and pull friction that makes this game great.  Just remember that every hour the botanist is out working a drill is an hour they’re not growing vegetables. 

As you explore the surface, you’ll find debris from where your ship broke up entering the atmosphere.  Personal items like a soccer ball, a lava lamp, or a favorite hoodie might seem an arbitrary and near-pointless keepsake to some, but given to somebody who ties a major life event to that object might change its significance.  These keepsakes from your life, which you brought along to remind you of home, can be given to these different versions of Jan, which can raise their spirits and give them hope.  Their cooperation will be crucial when these decisions get difficult and not everyone agrees with the method or the outcome.  

Very quickly you’ll start having to make very, very uncomfortable decisions.  The sorts of decisions that’d be deep into spoiler territory to disclose, but suffice to say that you’ll find yourself grappling with your own moral compass, and often.  There are consequences to pushing your human limits, both ethical and physical.  Drinking a beer and playing the beer pong minigame might help you unwind, but might not be great for a recovering alcoholic in your midst.  Similarly, watching a movie about alien doppelgangers might not be the best for somebody who believes in conspiracy theories.  Trying to keep your crew sane (and working efficiently) is just as crucial to your survival as keeping the base moving.

Having an effective crew in the right place and working the job they’re good at will produce far better results than you can on your own.  Sure, I can produce an air filter, but luddite that I am, it’d take an hour and a half.  For a worker, it’d take 30 minutes.  The right person for the job and all that.  

The Alters can be pretty grim at times, but I have to say one of my favorite parts is the interactions with your other selves.  The very talented Alex Jordan provides all the voice work for Jan and all of his alters.  Each of them have a slightly different voice and Alex brings them to life in a way that matches their personality in a believable way.  Similarly, you’ll encounter several folks from your employer, Ally Corp, who give solid performances.  As you find your schlocky movies scattered in the wreckage, you’ll also get to see some wonderfully goofy FMV videos (all of which star the same group of actors) and will have you laughing out loud.  It’s a bit of levity that I appreciated amidst the chaos and difficult moments.  Raising the spirit of all your alters at once is a great thing, but the bonus laughs for me as the player were appreciated.

Graphically, The Alters is pretty gorgeous.  It’s powered by Unreal Engine 5, enabling the team at 11 Bit Studios to give us a stunning game. The outside world is beautiful and foreboding, and the challenges you face (again, being vague on purpose) are alien and cryptic.  It’s a wonderful blend of the familiar and foreign. Up close, Jan’s portrait changes as you look at his alters, showing the differences in their faces to match their personality.  Their face also reflects their current attitude, and not in a janky L.A. Noire kind of way. When you talk to them, there are lots of subtle idle movements.  Eyes have small movements as they take in whatever they’re looking at, Jan will twitch his nose a bit, and there is a gentle sway as they breathe and stand.  It’s the little things that give a character life, and 11 Bit Studios absolutely nailed that aspect of The Alters. 

The game is not without its flaws.  Occasionally you’ll hit collision hangups, getting stuck on the environment, or slightly above the ground on fast travel.  It’s nothing a quick reload of a save or a fast travel wouldn’t fix, but it does happen. Some characters don’t get the royal treatment with full face modeling (anyone on comms is a static silhouette), and sometimes textures flicker or jitter.  It’s nothing time and a few patches won’t fix.  

There are a handful of UI elements that could use a coat of paint.  Assigning people to work or reassigning them requires a lot of jumping back and forth in menus, and you have to discover things like creating shift work – your crew won’t otherwise work around the clock, even if that’d make a lot of sense in this context.  Similarly, while the pressure to build out rooms and when is a challenge, it’s never enough of one to make you have to sell a room, and there’s no construction time, so remixing your base never feels like a punishment for poor planning.  Yes, you’ll have to plan ahead to make sure you’ve expanded the base enough for it to fit, but that’s not much of a challenge either.  Perhaps that’d make the game too hard, but by the end, it’s more nuisance than anything I had to plan too far in advance.  

It’ll take you around 20 to 22 hours to beat The Alters the first time.  At that point I’ll say “Congratulations, you’re just getting started”.  To see all this game has to offer will take at least 3-4 more runs, if not more.  There are also three difficulty levels and a toggle for how tight the economy is, but the replayability is more about the available choices.  For example, you cannot craft a psychotherapist in your first run – or at least I couldn’t find a way.  Perhaps different choices would unlock that, but I couldn’t find that path – maybe you can?  Having a licensed mental health professional on the team might change some of the outcomes I faced, but if not the first time around, perhaps the second?  Who would I give up to bring that person aboard, and what challenges would they bring to the table?  What about a doctor?  Would they be able to find a different solution to one of the most challenging moral quandaries in the game?  How would that impact the second half? I’m being purposely vague, but you’ll know precisely what I mean when you’ve beaten the game yourself.  I’m happy to say The Alters practically demands a full replay – backing up to a previous save won’t cut it here.  If we are indeed the product of our choices, I can’t wait to make different ones.