The Alters Review

11-Bit Studios, the team behind hits such as This War of Mine and Frostpunk, has been looking for its next hit for a while now. For years, The Alters has felt like the game that would be this title. A mysterious, captivating premise, a fun fusion of strategy and management, and gorgeous visuals. Well, for the most part, The Alters is another strong entry from 11-Bit Studios that delivers on its key promises.

While I have a few quibbles with it, I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing this world and the fascinating concept for a game, except when the performance issues got in the way.

Lost In Space

The Alters is a story about Jan Dolski - a man who has found his way onto the Project Dolly program for a big evil company. This program sends individuals to space in crews, in the hope of finding a rare resource called Rapidium. However, not everything goes to plan. Instead of landing safely on the planet, the entire crew crash-lands on the planet they were intended to land on, and Jan is the only survivor.

He is then forced to find his way back to their huge circular base, which landed on the planet, and try to contact the company’s command to figure out what to do next and how to get home. It’s a pulse-pounding, captivating opening that grabs you thanks to The Alters’ high production values and gorgeous environments. Even past the first few hours, I found myself taken aback by how consistently pretty the game is.

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The alien planet in The Alters is consistently stunning, and some great visual elements add allure to the empty rock.

After a few days on the planet, Jan discovers that Rapidium does exist here and establishes contact with the company’s command. They encourage him to use Rapidium to engage in an experimental cloning program where he alters his DNA to create clones of himself onboard the base that specialise in different areas: The Alters. These “alters” are created by selecting key life events in Jan’s life (which you can see in the base’s quantum computer) and selecting a divergence point.

Maybe Jan lost contact with someone he was in a relationship with, instead of spending months, if not years, with them? What if Jan had run away from home instead of staying when he was young? What if Jan focused more on his career than the people around him? These create new distinctive personalities for Jan that become members of the base and also alters you can instruct to work for you to mine resources, assist you in managing the base and crafting new items, or send them out to risky areas to take radiation damage, instead of you.

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You can view details on each choice and every key event in Jan’s life and his alters’ lives.

It’s an enthralling concept for a management game, especially one that isn’t bogged down by too many complex or grand systems.

Seeing Double

While a lot is going on here, the focus is more on the relationships between Jan and his alters and how these different personalities create conflict or friendships, and how your decisions when creating each alter can shape the base.

For example, each alter you make comes with some kind of bonus. A Jan specializing in handiwork may use fewer resources when crafting items and structures for harvesting materials from the planet. A Jan who experienced a harsh childhood may have the traits of a Guard, keeping other Alters in line and intimidating them when they try to disrupt the base’s effectiveness or create conflict.

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Decisions you make have big consequences and form the core of the game’s main story.

Every dialogue choice you make has ripple effects in a similar way. You can choose to tell alters about the company and their hunt for Rapidium, or the rescue operation more broadly. Some will react with frustration that you are believing the company or helping them out in the hunt for Rapidium, whereas others are more hopeful about getting off the planet. Some are also naive as to what might happen when they do leave, as they aren’t actual humans, just clones of Jan.

Individual conversations can change an alter’s mood for a while. Others want to spend time relaxing in a social room, like watching a movie, while others are keen to devote their attention to the mission, creating a balancing act for you to solve. Plus, if you start to withhold information from some, they can learn it from another alter or start fighting between them.

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Your dialogue choices and where you prioritise your focus will affect how the alters feel about you and the mission.

The game becomes a dual-plane management sim where you are managing resources and materials for your production and traversal across the planet, as well as managing and organizing the people within your base. The dichotomy between these two aspects works incredibly well, and it allows The Alters to carve out a unique space for itself within the sim/management genres. It is supported by excellent voice acting and lip-syncing, which is vital for a game that focuses so much on close-ups of character interactions.

The only real downside is that it does get a bit monotonous to hear the same voice over and over again, and only have one character to interact with. While they do all have distinct personalities, you are, at the end of the day. talking to yourself for most of the game, but the game does try to solve that with conversations via the base’s computer with company command and other individuals.

The Clock is Ticking

All of this is set against the backdrop of the game’s planet, where a sun is slowly getting closer and closer to the planet, making the rescue operation even more urgent. You need to have enough resources to move your base, which is built onto this giant wheel structure that can move around the planet, to stay out of range of the sun’s lethal radiation.

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The base’s design is one of the coolest things in The Alters. You can also expand its size as you progress through the game.

So, during the day, you can go out and find resources on mini-maps dotted across the planet, with different areas having different resources, traversal challenges, and threats like anomalies, which burst and cause radiation burn. These areas are mini explorable levels, and you can use devices you craft to remove obstacles, jump up to ledges, and get through various environmental obstacles. While exploring, you may even find more mysterious anomalies that hold secrets to the planet you are on, Rapidium itself, and more. There are a lot of tantalizing mysteries, and the game’s “alien planet aura” is impeccable, especially when the soundtrack steps up during key pivotal moments.

You can use a variety of tools to find resource deposit hot spots, like scanners and power pylons to connect outposts with your ship’s main power source. You then assign roles to your alters or operate these yourself. However, there are risks to having them work too long. If they stay out during the evening, they will get radiation poisoning, which requires them to sleep longer the next day. If you have them work constantly without any breaks on the base, they will feel despondent and trapped, with their mood and attitude towards you and the mission deteriorating.

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When you aren’t managing what happens inside your base, you will be working or exploring the planet you are stuck on to find resources.

It’s a big balancing act, and the game only saves at the start of every day. So, if you mess up, you need to replay the entire day as you can’t manually save. This problem also made the game’s performance issues worse. No matter which options and combination of settings I chose, I experienced horrific screen tearing sporadically, which also caused frame rates to plummet. These happened completely randomly, but during every 2-3 hour play session, it happened at least two times.

The only way to fix it was to restart the game, but if it happened during the middle of the day I had to choose to either restart now and lose the progress I had made, or play through to the end of the day with these problems and restart when the game saves in the morning. These issues were massively frustrating and just deflated the impact of the experience and key events if I played through the day with them. I hope they will get fixed for launch or in a patch, but I found no workaround or fix.

Despite those issues, while a lot is going on, 11-Bit Studios has made a lot of smart choices that make organizing your alters’ roles during the day and evening easy, thanks to one of the best menu systems I have used in a game in a while. Every function and status update for your alters can be seen in the game’s menu, and you can get a broad overview of their current mental state, what they have been working on, and more.

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The ability to manage everything to do with your base, alters, and production of items in one menu is a smart choice that makes everything more manageable.

Then, when it comes to assigning the production of items for exploration or cooking meals, you can do it all from the rooms within your base or from the game’s pause menu, which can be accessed at any time, even when exploring the planet. You can queue items in the workshop and kitchen and assign alters to work on them from one menu, which is hugely beneficial, and it makes managing the game’s many interweaving systems much more palatable.

Additionally, some key quality of life features include being able to set item minimums for crafting and cooking. For example, you can set a minimum of 10 meals to be placed in storage at any time. If the supply drops below that, an alter who isn’t assigned to something will offer to make them, which will maintain that amount, provided you have the resources. Alters will often suggest jobs to do, which you can say yes or no to at the click of one button. Finally, you can fast travel between the base, any of your outposts, and fast travel points you manually place on the map to get around quickly.

It all just removes a lot of the friction that can be found in the management genre, and I never once felt tired of having to deal with all the interweaving systems and mechanics on the go at the same time.

Because of the efforts made to make The Alters’ management systems so smooth and easy to engage with, the game really stands out and excels. The fascinating premise and the fact that it delivers on its promise of creating complex webs of interactions and decision-making between your alters means that 11-Bit Studios’ latest is another fantastic entry into their portfolio.