The Alters - Review (PC)

Who am I? And who are you? And who am I?

The Alters is a very interesting game. At first glance it may seem like a crafting survival game, but it is so much more. It’s been developed and published on PC by 11 bit studios.

The game starts with your character, Jan, crash landing on an unnamed planet. All his crew is dead, and he alone survives. He leaves his escape pod and pushes through this stormy planet to reach the base. He isn’t the captain, just a builder, but for his own survival now has to take control.

At the base there is a communications station, and though the signal is patchy, he works out what he needs to do. You start the game by receiving various instructions, gathering some resources outside, fixing up parts of the base, building new modules. An introduction to the games systems essentially.

Throughout these early moments, it’s made clear that your chances of survival are slim. That is, until you come across an element known as rapidium. Gathering this element is currently humanities main aim - and you seem to have discovered it in great quantities. The voices on the other end of the line suddenly become much more interested in helping you survive.

Rapidium is an element which when attached to organic structures, causes explosively quick growth. You test it out on some DNA of a sheep - and within minutes, a fully grown sheep is standing in front of you.

Once you have gathered the required materials, built the required modules and crafted what you need in the workshop, you are ready to move the base. The main thing threatening your survival is the sun of this planet, any sunrise will kill you. Therefore the only goal is to keep moving further and further away from it.

The game works on a time based system. Time passes when you are doing anything, and doing certain activities speeds it up, extracting resources for example. If you stay out too late you become tired, which in turn wakes you up later the next day, giving you less time to do things. In addition, stay out really late, and you won’t be able to work, and could potentially die from the night time radiation. It’s important then to get back to the base at a reasonable hour and go to bed - this is the point at which the game saves, there’s no manual saving in between.

You have to plan out your days, because each passing day brings you closer to a sunrise which you have to have moved on by then. When you start moving the base though, you realise there is a problem that you can’t fix. The person on the other end of the communication channel gives you a solution, and this is when the games real story kicks in.

Using the quantum computer on board, you are able to create branching paths of your own life’s memories. These branches take your life in radically different directions, to create a version of yourself that is almost a clone, but with different memories, which ultimately create a different personality. These branches may result in someone that is an engineer, or a scientist. All of which you need in your crew if you’re going to survive. You then use the womb module combined with rapidium to create these Alters, which is where the game gets its name.

This is a really cool and very interesting topic, and I really love that we are getting a survival crafting game with a proper narrative. More to this, the game goes deep with how you interact with your Alters. You can chat to them and socialise with them, they have individual moods and needs, you can give them gifts, and ultimately help them come to terms with what they are. They are of course initially freaked out by the circumstances of their existence, and the game doesn’t shy away from this.

So, in addition to the crafting and survival, we now have a compelling narrative with social based gameplay. It’s a full bag, they have really included a lot here. It’s all presented too with really great graphics - and not just graphics that look good, but are presented well too. What I mean by this, is that during the cinematics and a lot of gameplay, everything has a filmic quality to the way things are framed. It really enhances the visuals. In addition, I noticed no problems with performance, which is great.

Ultimately, I think The Alters might become one of those keystone experiences everyone ends up talking about. It’s sort of like Death Stranding in a way, in that it combines different genres to create something unique. I think they’ve done a great job here, and if you’re into games with a strange but unique narrative that actually feeds into the gameplay and doesn’t feel secondary to it, give this a try.

Rating - 4/5

Game code provided by Keymailer for the purposes of this review.