Developed and published by 11 bit studios, The Alters is a unique sci-fi narrative experience in which you will create your own clones in order to survive a harsh planet. Using unique resources, every clone that you create will carry something from your personality but add their own to the mix as well resulting in a crew full of different personalities despite sharing the same DNA and first-name. 11 bit studios has made a name for themselves by delivering some of the best video game experiences in the past and The Alters is no different. This is our review of The Alters on PC via Steam, in which we create our clones and explore harsh space environments to mine some Rapidium.
The Alters is set on a hostile planet where radiation is ramparted and you are alone. You play as Jon Dolski, an employee of space mining firm Ally Corp, a company dedicated to exploring the depths of space for the rare material Rapidium. As part of one such mission, you land on a planet, but your entire crew gets wiped out during the landing due to some technical issues. Now stranded on the planet with a base that requires multiple people to operate, you have no option left but to use the unique resource Rapadium and create your clones to operate the base, survive the planet, and escape with your life. Throughout the story, you interact with planet Earth with some helpful tips and some lore information, but you must rely on yourself and your Alters to survive the harsh planet.
The Alters are based on Jon’s own memories stored in the base’s Quantum Computer. It automatically picks a location where the memory can be split and creates a brand-new memory line for your Alter, giving it a different profession and personality. Combining Rapadium along with the Quantum Computer’s memory splicing technology and a DNA sample, you can create multiple forms of yourself in the game. While all of them are named Jan, they have their profession conveniently placed in their name as well, so you can identify them easily, like Jan Technician, Jan Scientist, Jan Cook, and so on.
The gameplay of The Alters combines three main elements together. Survival, base management, and exploration. Starting with the first one, survival. To survive, you will need a lot of resources, including those you will need for personal use and those you will need for your base. You must always have a steady supply of food for yourself and your Alters. There are no complex recipes here to collect and then make. Food is of two main types, mush and cooked meals. Mush is your everyday cheap alternative to stay alive, while a cooked meal increases morale and feeds everyone. Apart from eating, you will need to take care of some secondary needs as well, such as avoiding too much radiation, sleeping properly, socializing, and avoiding over-exhaustion. This goes for your Alters as well.
There are multiple ways to meet these needs in the game. Some are pretty basic, like eating your meal, working, and then you go to bed before you are over-exhausted, and you stop doing tasks when you are tired. This ensures that you have the energy to work in the morning and also keeps your Alters happy. As the game progresses, you will need to build additional facilities to unlock some additional requirements like an Infirmary to heal injuries, a Green House to raise your own vegetables, dormitories for your Alters, and even solo rooms if they deserve one. The choice ultimately lands in your hands, but the better you equip your base, the happier your crew is, and the more efficiently your base runs.
The Alters will need your full attention because, since each Alter has his own unique personality, differences occur between them, leading to various uncomfortable situations like sabotage and unrest. In such situations, you will need to step in and diffuse the situation. Things are not always easy because in my first playthrough, my Miner Alter cut off his own arm, and I had no infirmary to treat his wounds. This happened because I cut off his meds after he started getting into accidents around the base. Your choices have a major impact on the game, and you need to make sure that you stand by each choice that you make. As you clone more and more Alters, this keeps getting complicated, but there are a few tricks the game gives you to maintain decorum on the base, like cloning a guard or a shrink that takes care of any unruly behavior in their own way.
You also need to ensure that you take full advantage of each Alter’s strength. Use the miner at mining facilities, use the cook in the kitchen, use the scientist in the research lab, and so on. Each Alter clearly has a very distinctive profession, and they come with a bonus of tasks relating to it. You are free to assign them to other tasks if the need arises, but you will benefit mostly by assigning them to posts dedicated to their profession. You also need to keep their health in check and give them proper days off because some Alters will get injured or get radiation poisoning depending on their tasks. The ones out in the field, like working on Mining Posts, are mostly prone to radiation poisoning, so you can switch their tasks easily. This is one of The Alter’s best features, which makes multitasking very easy thanks to an intuitive UI.
If you have a healthy crew, not just physically but mentally too, you will notice it inside your base. They will be friendly with each other as they walk past each other, and they will engage in healthy activities. Some will even help each other without you interfering. Alternatively, if your Alters are not happy with each other, the tension is reflected in your base’s environment. They will pass snarky comments while walking past each other, and sometimes verbal fights will also take place, where you will need to interfere and make some tough choices. There are some other points in the story as well where you will need to make choices, during which one will be happy while the other one will be upset, but random encounters happen more often with a restless crew. The Alters is a narrative-heavy title, so you should go in expecting to invest heavily in it. It is not just some space survival system where you keep cloning yourself and assigning them to different mining stations to collect resources and expand your base.
Your Alters are not the only thing that you need to worry about in the game. Your base is a full-time job as well because it is continuously running out of storage space, the radiation filters need to be replaced, and the modules you add will require maintenance. You will also need to optimize your base for incoming calamities like storms. For these tasks, you will need to be on your toes as you queue up tasks for the production of important items like repair kits and radiation filters. You will also need to ensure that all base maintenance is carried out on time because if minor damage is not repaired, it leads to major issues and causes more problems for you. You can automate these processes as well by assigning Alters to production and tasks, but this is something that you need to worry about as well.
Your base is a mobile platform inside a giant tire, but it is also extremely modular, giving you complete freedom to move around modules and adjust according to your own taste. But you need to ensure that everything is connected with an elevator, and you and the Alters have access to it. As you add more modules, your base’s mass will increase, and you will need more fuel to run it. After doing some research, you can increase the overall size of your base as well, which will allow you to add even more modules to the base as long as you have the resources and space. With the base being modular, you can move around modules to increase your Alters’ efficiency as well.
The game also simplifies some base-building mechanics, like there is no physical resource collection. You will not see your crew manually picking up and shipping resources to the base. Everything is transferred via the pylons that you use to connect the mining facilities to the base. You do not have a separate inventory. Everything that is collected goes straight to the base’s storage. There is no individual storage management as well. Adding a storage module just increases your overall storage space, so there is no resource micromanagement involved here. This eliminates all those pesky tasks that you normally have to worry about, giving you ample space to focus on the story and other tasks at hand.
To ensure that everything works like a charm, you will need to collect resources of different types from the planet. You are part of a mining firm, so there is no shortage of mining equipment with you, and your base, given that you have the blueprints for it. Some are unlocked with story progression, some are uploaded to you via Earth, and some are unlocked after you have built their prerequisites. The exploration bit of The Alters will allow you to explore the planet, build mining facilities, collect resources, and establish a streamlined infrastructure to ensure a smooth workflow for everyone. However, once you step out into the open, it is all hostile environments. You need to be well-equipped to handle them. Every time you stop in a new location, you will need to explore the surroundings, find some resource deposits using your Polygonal Scanners, and then establish mining posts and connect them to your base using pylons for resource collection.
To traverse the treacherous terrain, you will need additional equipment like climbing poles and drills. These items will either require suit charges or their own specific items, like if you need to melt rocks in your path, you must have a drill and its heat cartridges. You do not need to keep anything in your inventory. Items are all kept in the base, and they are used automatically even if you are out in the field. You just need to ensure that the storage has the required items. You have until the evening to collect as many resources as possible and explore the planet before the radiation takes over and it becomes unsafe to come out. You can come out at night later in the game, but only with the best gear present in the game. Your Alters will go to their workstations and back themselves after you have assigned them tasks. There is no further micromanaging required for them. You do not even have to collect everything back, as the game does it for you when you resume your journey and start moving to your next destination.
Apart from your main quest, you can also look towards completing some side quests as well. These will range from base quests to a special request by an Alter. Naturally, you cannot complete them all, so you must prioritize as the game is actually running against time as well. Every time you stop at a location, you must complete everything before the sun catches up to you. You need to stay away from the sun, and it catches up to you with every passing day, so you need to balance your personal quests, your Alters’ quests, base quests, and the main quest. This is where the replayability factor of the game kicks in because, since you cannot do everything in a single playthrough, you can play it again and try out some different quest choices or side with another Alter in a discussion this time around and see what happens.
Visually, The Alters is a very striking game. Right from the very first scene, you instantly see the game in all of its glory. The environmental design is amazing, and some in-game elements appear in the game, like the resources hiding deep below the surface, and how they appear when you scan them. The radiation and how it affects your vision appear to be something straight from a sci-fi movie. The character design, while decent, does not wow you too much, but at least every Alter looks different from the others. The same is the case with cutscenes, which are presented in the form of a visual novel. Their facial expressions and animations look believable, and their movement animations are fine as well, but you can easily tell after a few hours that the focus was on the environment rather than the characters when it came to visual fidelity. When you encounter an anomaly and it starts moving towards you, the distortions around it and the overall effects are simply amazing. The Alters is a visual treat, and every scene has something beautiful to offer, whether it is a lava-filled river or a radiation sea out in the middle of nowhere.
Final Verdict:
The Alters is a gorgeous-looking sci-fi space survival game that offers high replayability thanks to its diverse choice system. It ditches the micromanagement aspects of a base-builder survival game and simplifies mechanics to offer a more focused gameplay on the narrative and the choices that you must make to shape your journey. Featuring amazing gameplay, beautiful locations, a solid sound design, and plenty of choices to make, The Alters is simply one of the best sci-fi survival games to launch this year so far. It caters to a diverse range of players, ranging from sci-fi lovers to base-building fans or players who love making tough moral choices. If you love playing games that offer them, The Alters should be on your must-play list.
Final Score: 9.0/10
A PC Steam review code for The Alters was provided by the publisher for this review. Read ourReview Policy.
