The Alters Review

Just before I took on reviewing The Alters, I decided to watch the 1996 Michael Keaton movie, Multiplicity. Something about The Alters triggered a memory in my pop culture brain, making me think it had taken heavy inspiration from what I remembered as a fairly average film. It had been ages since I’d last seen it and part of me wondered if I had actually seen the movie and just remembered the trailer. Either way, after spending two hours watching the movie and making my way through The Alters I feel fairly confident that it’s what would happen if Multiplicity and Sliding Doors merged — only in space.

I’m perhaps being a little unfair to The Alters; there’s a lot more going on here than just cloning yourself for funsies and how you go about almost everything will have an impact on your journey. The story begins dramatically: your ship crash lands on a planet’s surface and, as luck would have it, you’re the only survivor. Normally this might be a cause for celebration, however, you soon find out your unicycle of a base is a little bit broken and, without help, you can’t get it moving anyway. As you scour the local landscape for resources you come across a mineral that was the whole point of the expedition; Rapidium.

In typical sci-fi cliché fashion, Rapidium is a newly discovered element that appears to have time-accelerating properties. After a successful test of cloning a sheep called Dolly, AllyCorp, the people who sent you, see dollar signs and so your rescue is a priority. That doesn’t mean things are going to be easy, far from it, as almost everything about where you are is hostile. There are storms, weird anomalies, and plenty of other weird and wonderful “features” of this planet you’ve landed on. Oh, and did I mention the sunrise is lethal? Thanks to intense radiation, just seeing it can kill you. All-in-all, it’s unlikely to be a holiday destination of the future.

With the urging of a mysterious voice from Earth, you’re encouraged to interact with the onboard quantum computer and navigate your memories. Thanks to some weird scan you agreed to before launch — because who really reads the fine print on these things? — the computer can highlight moments in your life where, thanks to major life choices, rather than being Jan Dolski the builder, you could’ve been Jan Dolski the technician. Here’s where we meet the Sliding Doors aspect of The Alters. It’s probably more accurate to say it takes its cues from the multiverse theory in that there are unlimited dimensions where all things happen and as you progress you can, if you want, create more Jan Dolskis to aid your trip to the rendezvous point for rescue.

This becomes central to the game’s core loop. As the story unfolds, you’ll face problems that require you to lean on your Alters to help. Whether it’s gathering resources to either aid in your escape from the planet, stopping the planet from cooking you or just basic survival, having Alters complete some of these tasks for you can be helpful. However, you also have to manage their mood and their own personal issues. Each one of them has their own life lesson to teach your Jan prime. If you do so, it opens up conversation options later in the game that can be of use. Equally important is their mood — neglect them too much, and they might rebel, jeopardising the entire mission. You have many hats to wear and I must admit that certain points in the game felt overwhelming at first and it took a few unfortunate deaths to get a handle on the best way for my Jan to get through.

Thankfully, as overwhelming as it can get, the resource management aspect is really pretty simple in terms of how you get resources and how you make things. Magnetic storms that crop up are probably the trickiest events to navigate in terms of making sure you have what you need. Equally, if you’re careful about how much wandering you do, making sure to stay on mission, you shouldn’t ever be caught, and cooked, by the sun. However, making sure to go a little off the track allows you to find collectibles such as movies and random bits of your luggage that can have positive effects on your Alters. Movies, for example, can be played on the big screen if you build the entertainment module. It boosts all your Alters' moods so can be used in a pinch if they seem to be having a rough time. There’s also beer pong, which, win or lose, improves your relationship with the Alter you play against.

You can even watch a movie to pass the time, and they’re delightfully weird

Balancing what you build in your base is an important part of The Alters as some of them are a necessity, such as storage, whilst others are optional but beneficial. Building a greenhouse, for example, lets you grow crops and provide cooked meals instead of the appetisingly named mush which is the default. A refinery helps you break down enriched metals that you mine into usable metals and organics, aiding in your resource gathering. There are also other modules to help with your Alter's moods and wellbeing, such as a gym or a holographic garden. The downside is that this increases your base’s weight, and by extension, the amount of organics you need to harvest in order to keep moving from the lethal sunrise. You can upgrade your base and each tier has a weight limit. If you’re too heavy, you’ll need to shed weight to move, and that means trashing modules. You do get some resources back depending on the module’s condition, but it leads to tricky decisions about what to keep and what not to, should you find yourself in this position.

As you make your way through the prologue and three main acts of The Alters, you’ll be faced with a few key decisions and conversations that will shape how the final act plays out. If you’re too focused on the mission and let things with your Alters degrade too much, you can wind up in a very big creek with only a teaspoon for a paddle. At its heart, The Alters explores that universal 'what if?' question, the lingering thoughts about paths not taken. We’ve all been there, wondering what our life would be like had we made this choice instead of that choice. Who we are as a person is shaped by our experiences and how we choose to respond to them. You can see this playing out in each of the different Jans, made all the more clearer if you read through their stories. The technician, for example, stood up to the abusive father Jan had, stayed with their mother and later in life was betrayed by others and so is sceptical of any corporation and anyone in authority. He’s quick to anger and is difficult to control and in a way is the opposite of Jan Prime who chose to run away from his problems rather than face them.

Ultimately, the story is fine, decent but never quite epic, even with the high stakes at play and the impact your choices have on it. I cared about my Alters and about Jan, but it just never seemed to fully hook me. The underlying questions it poses about life choices and alternate paths was thought-provoking and how your Alters could impact you as Jan Prime. Having gone through some major life changes myself recently, I’m all too aware of the “what if?” rabbit hole you can lose yourself in. Do I think there’s an alternate me somewhere in the multiverse? Sure. Do I wish I’d made different choices? No. I certainly wouldn’t want to meet them either, moral issues aside, but by recognising you could be something you’re not potentially undermines the person you are and there’s nothing wrong with the person you’ve become.

The Alters is a compelling game in terms of the questions it poses about alternate life paths. How it presents that in its story is decent if not exactly mind-expandingly good. I appreciate the fact that it doesn’t lean too heavily into its resource gathering side and that combat, if you can call it that, is mostly just waving a purple light at anomalies that don’t shoot back. 11bit Studios have created a fun game with a concept that is gloriously pulpy sci-fi, and I’m very much here for it. It doesn’t hit every mark, but it dares to be different — and for that alone, it deserves recognition.