In 1989, Cher once asked if she could turn back time, she would do things differently. Words would have been taken back, and her love would have stayed. 11 bit studios created The Alters to answer just that question. As Jan Dolksi, Jan Dolski, Jan Dolski, Jan Dolski, and Jan Dolski you will fight to survive on a barren world full of the wonder element, Rapidium. As Cher’s music rings inside your head, you’ll choose different life paths in this survival/crafting/base/building/exploration game. It’s every genre I hate, and yet a game I loved (when it worked).
As Cher once… never mind. The Alters, a day one Game Pass launch, takes you to a far-distant planet. As you crash land, things have gone terribly wrong, and you’ll do whatever it takes to survive. This is a survival game, with lots of crafting, resource grinding, base management, and 3rd person exploration. I am not a fan of most of those genres, but I found this game’s clever mix of systems and intriguing plot to make it an immensely enjoyable experience.
A large part of the game, as anyone who’s watched a trailer knows, is your Alters. These clones are created with a Quantum Computer that knows every detail of your life. By altering specific life choices, it can figure out how your life would have gone, creating entirely different personalities and skill sets, using Rapidium, that all share the same name and likeness.
The Alters is as much a relationship simulator as anything. Jan’s disparate personalities all have their own quirks and needs. Depending on your choices, both dialogue and side-objective-wise, you will shape the narrative that itself can branch in a fair number of ways. I’ve played through nearly twice now on Steam (Xbox code wasn’t ready as early). Let’s break down what the gameplay loop is.
Clone Drones in the Circular…dome
The game starts with your botched entry to a planet far distant from Earth. It’s a harsh, inhospitable world with a Sun that vaporizes anything caught in its path. To begin with, you’ll control the game from an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. It felt great on both controller and mouse/keyboard.
The environments are a series of interconnected corridor-style layouts. Some may have movement blockers that require an item to vaporize, and others will drain your hazard suit of power. All of it comes down to resource management and crafting. I don’t want to spoil where things can go. Suffice it to say that keeping everyone happy, well-fed, and the base running is tough enough. Add in the constant threat of the environmental magnetic storms and the soft timer of the Sun reaching your ship and frying it, means time is always of the essence.
The game does a great job of having you do tasks just long enough for them to start to feel repetitive, before giving you upgrades that automate the process. Though when things are automated, you’ll still need to manage who is working on what, when, and where. It’s a never-ending dance between real-time gameplay in your ship (from a side perspective), outside (3rd person), or the game’s many menus.
Altered States
At first, the constant jump between real-time gameplay and menu management can feel disjointed. After clearing the first week or so of days, it was a breeze. I did end up sticking with mouse and keyboard as it made the menu part of the game a bit snappier. This is any Xbox Play Anywhere title, so you should be able to jump between any Xbox store, whether it’s a console or PC that you own.
The main loop of the game is going out into the environment and finding organic material, metals, Rapidium, and more via third-person exploration. You have a work shift for you and each Alter. As the day starts, everyone needs to eat. Mush is on the menu until you have a Greenhouse; once that’s up and running, the Jan Botanist Alter can quickly grow fresh veggies. Finding mining spots for near-infinite supply production is key as you go from area to area.
To get these materials to your ship, you’ll need to find them, use your beacons to locate the main vein, and then set up a drilling station. Drilling stations require resources, of course, so you may have to hand mine the smaller veins dotted around the map. Doing this takes time, the game’s most precious resource. As you drill or use any equipment, time will pass more rapidly, with indicators showing how long until you gain a set number of items from that activity. None of that matters, though, unless you’ve used the game’s pylon system to run cables from the station to your ship.
Jan Prime’s job on the mission was “Builder”. That means you, as the main character, can create new habitats on your ship. As you gain new Alters, they’ll need a dorm or rooms of their own. Your Doctor can use a trauma center to heal those injured by faulty equipment or dosed with dangerous amounts of radiation. This never-ending balancing act is made all the more difficult as you must juggle the feelings of each crew member you create.
The Alters
As much as I came to enjoy the gameplay loop, my favorite part of the game was building relationships with my Alters. The game smartly keeps saves to an every morning one. It will keep a lot on hand so you can always go back and fix your mistakes as needed. When you load an old save, it will remember the dialogue choices you made the first time through and give them a large pink diamond in the UI.
Figuring out what made each of my Alters tick, what would motivate them, make them rebellious, or keep them in line was key to success. The first time through, I neglected the Alter who stops the others from fighting. I had a serious amount of division in my ranks that first playthrough. So far in the second one, he’s kept people in line while I work less on them and more on our survival.
There’s a ton of replayability in who you choose to create, when you do it, and how you respond to their needs. This extends to the non-Alter NPCs whom you converse with via a communications room. They’re mostly on Earth and working to bring you (and as much Rapidium as you can mine) back home. Do you tell them about the Alters? If so, who do you tell and when? I chose to never tell, worried about the laws I had broken, only for it to come out anyway after a series of disasters. I rolled back my save, averted those disasters, and got through the section with those people none the wiser.
The dialogue is well written, and incredibly well acted by the voice of all the Alters, Alex Jordan. He pulls of the Herculean task of giving all of these different versions of Jan their own personality and intonations without it sounding like the same person just doing a voice.
The Planet’s Sights and Sounds
Lastly, this is an Unreal Engine 5 game, and it can be extremely pretty. While the character models and habitats look good, the environments look great. I was running maxed out 4K on PC, getting roughly 120 FPS locked on a 5800x/7900xtx combo. I unfortunately did not have the ability to check out the game on Xbox now, though I did play it a few months ago on the system, and both the 30fps and 60fps modes felt good. I ended up sticking with 30fps on Xbox back then, though I only played about an hour of the game in a much earlier version on the console.
The game has two primary camera positions, as mentioned previously. Outside, it’s third person, and inside it’s 2.5D. There’s a little bit of depth in each habitat room, and a large part of the game will be what rooms you build, where you put them, and how you gain access to them. Every new unit has mass, and moving from site to site requires a certain amount of organic compound. While you can add more storage space for metals and the rest, you can only upgrade the organic compound limit a few times via the Scientist Alter’s research mechanic.
Learning how each system works, seeing that interactivity, and listening to it all as the game’s chill soundtrack kicks in should not be spoiled in a review like this. It’s a damned fun mix of panic inducing time limits, a light “combat” system that isn’t really about fighting, and min-maxing your days away as you try to not get fried, get home, and keep everyone happy.
What doesn’t make me happy are all the bugs I experienced in my Steam review build. UI glitches happened a few times, the worst of it was when a particular mechanic at the end of Act 2 wasn’t working. I needed it to move on to act 3, and it took 4 extra days before it finally kicked in and let me go. I reloaded save after save, wasting 5+ hours trying to get it to work before it finally did.
I’m playing a version you will never see, of course, so hopefully it isn’t something you guys have to worry about. It was one of dozens of small bugs that hampered my overall enjoyment in the latter half of the game.
Wrapping Things Up
The Alters is a uniquely fun take on a series of game mechanics I normally loathe. If you told me that I would greatly enjoy a crafting, base-building, relationship management, resource-grinding game, I would never have believed you. Instead, when it works at least, this one is an easy recommendation to anyone with Game Pass or who is interested in the fantastic premise.
The Alters | Review
Played on
PC via Steam
PROS
- Exploration
- Micro-Management
- Macro Management
- Voice Acting
CONS
- Buggy as all heck on Steam
