Games worth discovering

The Alters is a spooky sci-fi survival game that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before

2K View2023-10-05

Picture this: You’ve crashed on a hostile alien planet. It’s up to you to map its surface, find resources, study any anomalies you discover, and build and maintain a base of operations. There’s only one reasonable way to handle all of this, and that’s by making a bunch of clones of yourself. That’s the basic premise of The Alters, a sci-fi management/survival game in the works at 11 Bit Studios, the developer behind fascinating games like This War of Mine and Frostpunk.

Like other games in 11 Bit’s catalog, The Alters has some deeper questions to address than the simple matter of survival. Playing as a man named Jan Dolski, you can create clones of yourself, but these aren’t exact duplicates of the Jan who wound up stranded on a distant planet. Using a substance called Rapidium that he discovers on this alien world, Jan can produce clones of himself as he might have been if he had made different choices at key points in his life.

These “alters” can be radically different from the Jan we meet initially. One version of Jan decided not to go to university, instead going to work in a local mine after finishing high school. A clone of that potential Jan might know a lot about heavy machinery and be good at making repairs to the base and using prospecting equipment in the hostile environment outside. In another life, Jan might have pursued his PhD rather than getting married, becoming a distinguished, but socially isolated, scientist.

These alternate Jans not only have different skill sets, they also have different perspectives, priorities, and stress triggers, all of which have been shaped by the alternate paths they’ve taken in life. While these differences can be useful—even essential if Jan is ever going to make it home—they can also lead to conflict. The Jans do not always see eye-to-eye on things, and they can get into pretty fierce arguments if their disagreements aren’t handled carefully.

While Jan’s busy managing interpersonal relationships between his alters, there’s also the issue of survival to worry about. The planet he’s found himself stranded on isn’t a pleasant place; it’s an unforgiving, rocky hellscape, and its thin atmosphere offers almost no protection from the radiation produced by its sun. That means Jan’s in a race against time to figure out how to keep his base moving so that it stays on the dark side of the planet.

The Alters also uses a unique mechanic to search for useful minerals: While out on foot, Jan can place sensors on the ground, arranged around a possible deposit. Once linked together in a loop, these sensors will display a wireframe image of the mineral formations below—it’s almost like staring into a one-bit “hole” in the ground. Once a rich vein of ore turns up on the sensors, Jan can place a mining rig on the location, but it’ll require power provided by the base.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in The Alters, and it’s unlike any game I’ve seen before. Sure, there are elements of survival and management games present, but the whole is something unique—it feels like a modern spin on a classic science fiction novel in all the best ways.

There’s no release date set for The Alters yet, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one for sure.