Have you ever had a moment in your life that you look back on and thought about how you could have done things differently? If you were given the chance, would you want to see how much your life would change if you altered a significant event in your past? Would the alternate versions of yourself even want to talk to you? How might you have turned out, you wonder. Well, in The Alters, you get the answer to that question. Again. And again. And again. I think this may be one of the coolest concepts for a singleplayer game that I’ve ever experienced and it’s definitely left me with a profound sense of self.
The Alters starts like any good survival game: You’ve crash landed in an escape pod, you don’t know where you are and everyone that crashed with you had the misfortune of not being the main character. It’s up to you, Jan Dolski, to continue your mission and get your portable base off of this strange new planet. Said base comes in the form of a starship in the shape of a gigantic wheel, and you’ll need to refuel it and repair some of the more important parts of the ship before you can flee to safety. Or rather, that’s how it’s supposed to go. I don’t want to delve too far into the story of this game as I truly believe it’s one that you HAVE to experience for yourself (I’ll touch on that later), but as you can probably guess your plans go wrong and you’ll have to find an… alternative solution.
Now, the story. How do I even tackle this without thrusting the absolutely wonderful narrative in front of the spotlight and spoiling it for would-be Alters? Well, I won’t! Or at least, I won’t talk about anything that happens after the prologue. Because I truly, truly think you should play this game. I am a fan of sci-fi. I’m an even bigger fan of good sci-fi. The Alters is good sci-fi, plain and simple. It made me think, like really think about… myself? In a way that I didn’t think a game could encourage, to be perfectly honest. It sounds a bit corny but I genuinely did take a minute to sit back and wonder how different versions of me would seem if I’d have changed a couple of aspects of my life up to now.
But what are the titular Alters that feature in the game? Like I said before, this is a sci-fi game. As such, you already know that there was bound to be some sort of “unobtanium™” that is required to create alternate versions of the player character. In The Alters’ case, the material in question you’ll be hunting to create new Alters is ‘rapidium’. It’s shiny, looks incredibly wicked up close and is revered by anyone that mentions it in an almost disbelief-like manner.
I found it quite hilarious that the game gave me the option to straight up tell a voice on the other side (Potentially your corporate boss) that you’ve done what nobody else could do and uncovered likely one of the most breakthrough discoveries in the history of everything. Coupled with your base’s fancy quantum computer to pick through your memories and identify important ‘branching events’, you’ve got all you’ll need to start pumping out Jans’!
Enough of me gushing, though. What else do you do besides spend your time spawning new versions of you that have differing levels of emotional availability? As mentioned, It’s a survival game, so you can expect the basic level of crafting, resource gathering and resource management, as well as some base management too! The loop of go outside, grab resources, plant mining outposts, return to base was pretty rapid, I found. You won’t have to spend too much time standing next to a console and repeatedly mashing the farm key, nor can you. There is also a stamina system that limits the amount of tasks and work you’re able to achieve each day, so you’ll have to plan around that accordingly.
Possibly one of the more pressing issues you’ll find yourself dealing with in The Alters, is the fact that you’re running on essentially borrowed time. The planet that you’re on is orbiting a sun that, like most suns tend to do, emits powerful rays of heat-death that mean you’ll want to steer well clear of them if you’re to survive. This ever-present threat of being turned into a barbecued vessel serves as your driving force, and the game relishes in the opportunity to tell you how many days you’ve got until the sun catches up to you.
Every day in-game is extremely important, so making sure that you take advantage of every second to farm resources or perform maintenance is paramount to your eventual escape. The game also only saves at the end of every day, which caught me off guard at first. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of games not having a save option but I can see how it adds to the overall vibe of survival.
The Alters is a game that I am, as of writing this review, still playing through. I know that there are multiple endings based on how you react to certain events during the story, and I fully intend to experience all of them as the narrative for me is just. that. good. If you’re a fan of sci-fi as a genre then you owe it to yourself to give this game a try. Survival not really your thing? You don’t have to focus on it too much, I promise, although it does feed into the experience rather well I will say. It’s cool! It’s funky! It’s everything I want from this sort of genre, and I reckon it’ll go down as a classic that retains its stopping power long after the game’s time in the sun.
You can grab The Alters on Steam, PlayStation and the Xbox Store.
“Me, Myself, AI” could have been an awesome title too !