The Alters: Last Variable Review

My lasting impression after completing my first run through of The Alters was that it felt like a missed opportunity. It was good fun and offered a decent challenge, but I felt it could have done more with its story, its characters, and its central cloning premise. You spent so much time gathering resources and scrambling to craft what you needed to keep your giant wheel moving that there was rarely time for anything else. With the Last Variable you actually get a chance to breathe, take your time and not just speed run your way to the finish.

Without spoiling too much of The Alters, if you explored enough you may have come across an area of this barren rock that you’re on that sustains life. This is especially curious as, once the sun rises, it obliterates everything — so how some flora is surviving is quite remarkable. If you cloned the scientist version of Jan, then he in particular is interested as to how this occurs. The events of the Last Variable take place after the ending of The Alters and the scientist has decided to stay behind to investigate this phenomenon in depth. Things quickly prove more complicated than the original Jan expected, and so you take over the cloned version of the clone of Jan Dolski. Make sense? Great.

This time around you don’t have any contact with Earth, and for good reason. Depending on how you approached the original story, cloning is surrounded by more than a few ethical questions. Fortunately, your predecessor leaves behind an AI version of himself to guide your research. Janbot — hardly the most imaginative name — helps investigate the oasis while keeping the project moving. The gameplay loop is much the same, except this time your base stays put and, better still, you're no longer under constant pressure to keep it moving. 

Whilst the sun still rises every fourteen days and scorches everything it sees aside from this oasis, you can sleep through it and wake back up and carry on where you left off. You still have to mine resources, collect samples and keep your base running but there’s a little less time pressure this time around. It allows you to take your time, plan your base a bit more and use each cycle to focus on something rather than everything. That being said, you will still find it helpful to make more clones and not just to keep you company.

Just as in the main campaign, you can change a choice in scientist Jan’s life to create a different one. Each of them have their own strengths as well as emotional baggage and each one will require you to help keep them on an even keel to help you out. They also provide bonuses to certain tasks so they’re well worth your time to create. Just don’t create too many at once unless you fancy yourself as a psychologist too. It’s not tricky but it’s a lot to handle when you’ve also got to keep the story going by researching and terraforming new parts of the barren planet as you learn more and more about how and why it exists.

As before, you'll face choices that influence what options remain open to you. Unfortunately, the expansion inherits the base game's biggest weakness. The story is interesting, but rarely emotionally involving. At one point you're asked to leave an Alter behind to witness the sunrise, permanently removing them from the game. It feels like it should be a devastating moment, yet I barely reacted. The story moves forward, but the emotional payoff never arrives. 

The Last Variable is a worthwhile expansion that shares both the strengths and weaknesses of The Alters. If you loved the original, there's plenty here to enjoy. If it never clicked with you, though, this DLC won't change your mind.