The Alters is A Unique Hard Sci Fi Twist on Survival
- Antal Bokor
- Jun 12
- 5 min read
Very minor spoilers follow
The Alters is a narrative heavy game, so I want to let you know that I’ve kept this review as spoiler free as possible.
Hard sci-fi is something that video games tend to fumble in a lot of ways. Even games like Elite Dangerous with its 1:1 scale universe has you interact with most of its world by shooting at it. The Alters, however, manages to use its hard sci-fi premise well. It doesn’t just explore space and weird anomalies, but it asks questions about who we are and what makes a person a person.
In The Alters, you play as Jan Dolski. An accident leaves you the lone survivor of an expedition. You can’t survive on your own, so you’re forced to make clones of yourself to fill in the crew roles. Luckily, you have access to a quantum computer that can literally analyze alternate timelines and use them to construct an alternate Jan Dolski–one who made different life decisions, leading to a different career specialization.
I’m going to get this out of the way right away: The Alters requires a whole truck load of contrivances to make sense. Sci-fi usually requires a bit of suspension of disbelief and acceptance of some silliness, and The Alters is really no exception. But the point of The Alters is to tell a character driven story of survival against the odds on an alien world full of strange phenomena. And it asks the question: why are we who we are?
The Alters is part survival game, part base building game, and part character-driven narrative adventure game. Each of these parts is interconnected, but distinct–all tied together with a gameplay loop that has Jan exploring, gathering resources, crafting items, assigning tasks, solving crises, and managing the emotional state of his alternate selves. There are lots of choices to make in The Alters, and each of the choices you make is important. Lots of games like to say that, but The Alters can have an early decision snowball in unexpected ways later.
In The Alters, gameplay is divided up into days. If you don’t like time pressure in your video games, I have bad news: there is always a clock ticking in The Alters. There is always some crisis that needs your attention while you have to worry about gathering enough supplies and feeding all of the hungry mustachioed faces. That means it’s not possible to see everything in your first playthrough of The Alters, and the game even has a system in place for when you replay it that shows you what dialogue choices you made previously.
Just like it’s not possible to do everything, it’s also not possible to keep all of your alters happy. Each alter will have his own motivations and desires. They can get frustrated and lash out, or even rebel. You can choose to keep your alters in line with punishments, or use kindness. This also means potentially taking time and precious resources away from anything that might be critical to your group’s survival. Sometimes you just need to sit back and have a movie night before everyone suffers from burnout.
The emotional state of your alters is important, and monitored throughout the playthrough. You generally want to keep the alternate Jan Dolskis happy. But The Alters does a lot of things video games are notorious for: they just tell you how a character is feeling. Worse: the character just says "I feel this way.” Even if that character has compelling reasons, sometimes the alters’ feelings are incongruous with the reality of the situation. Then again, I can’t really tell you how I’d react if I found out I was a clone made for a specific task, so maybe I’m over thinking it.
Basebuilding is an important part of The Alters. Your base is Jan and his alters’ home, and their vehicle that brings them to new locales. It is completely modular, expandable, and transportable. In fact, the entire base is circumferenced by a wheel that serves as the bases’ mode of conveyance. Each base module is a block, and can be moved around on a grid. This grid is confined within the wheel–which isn’t the best configuration for something like a grid that prefers square shapes. Add in a giant tank nearly in the middle of the thing, and base building becomes like a puzzle game. As the base gets bigger, this is less of an issue, but you really have to work to cram in everything you want in the early game.
As your living and working space gets bigger, and/or you need more hands to help with tasks, you’ll inevitably start making more alters. Making copies of yourself to fill in gaps in your crew is as easy as spending a few resources. But you’re creating a whole new life, and narratively, it’s not a casual thing. There are consequences for each alter you create, not to mention the fact that the alter has to cope with the fact that it's a copy made for a specific purpose. There are definitely moral and social implications at play beyond needing more food and extra beds to house all of these freshly minted copies.
Alters can be helpful, though. As you’re out exploring you can have them working in the workshop, making food, repairing the base, and doing any other mundane tasks. There’s a certain fun to be had juggling each of your alters between tasks. And they’re fairly helpful at filling in when a task needs to be completed and no one is working on it, often asking if they can jump in whenever they finish whatever job they were working on.
The exploration sections of The Alters can be tense, rewarding, and frustrating. It’s fun planning for excursions and having all of the right equipment for the job. Early on it feels like there is a real risk/reward situation as you go out further and run into stranger and more dangerous things. Later on, when you’re more established, most of that feeling of danger goes away. Once you have alters back at base replenishing consumable items while you’re out exploring, it doesn’t feel as dangerous, since these items show up in your inventory instantly no matter where you are.
Exploration is essential, too, as it uncovers important story elements, new secrets, and valuable resource deposits where you can set up mining nodes. These nodes also work as lifelines as you can recharge your suit and fast travel to base and back.
Despite its compelling narrative, The Alters is definitely a little rough around the edges in parts. I’ve encountered a fair amount of bugs, like freakish facial animations and characters conversing when they’re not even in the same room.
I also had a really hard time getting into The Alters at first. It’s slow to start, and felt like a lot of concepts dumped into my lap all at once. But once I was able to sort everything out and figure out the best way to play The Alters, I went from having to force myself to start playing to having to force myself to stop.
The Alters isn’t a perfect game, but its the first game since Soma that had me thinking about what makes a person a person. But instead of driving me into an existential crisis like Soma did, The Alters made me look at myself and wonder if there was somewhere I could have taken a different path. But The Alters is also about using people and the morality behind that–even if those people you are using are happy with it. It’s a lot to take in, but in the end, The Alters manages to succeed at what I think it set out to accomplish.
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