Split Personality: The Alters

Mix some light survival with life's deepest question: choice or destiny?

‣ The Alters
From: 11 bit studios
Platforms: PC
Release: 2024
Steam Page • Demo Video • Developer Site

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1080) didn't think much of predestination. Our futures are not written in stone, and our choices decide our trajectory into the future. As he put it, we are condemned to be free because once thrown into the world, we are responsible for everything we do.

It's a strange concept for a game, though, and yet a wildly entertaining one. The Alters takes Satre's existentialism to the max, diving headlong into a bizarre science-fiction experience that deftly incorporates several genres. And as one of the early Unreal Engine 5 alums, it also looks pretty spectacular.

You play as Jan, part of a small crew on a space mission to find a speculative element called Rapidium. Things are off to a terrible start: Jan awakens from his cryopod, jettisoned out of the spacecraft onto a desolate, spooky planet. He soon discovers that his crewmates were also ejected, and he is the only survivor, which will have big implications later.

But first, he must survive, commandeering the mission's surface base: a giant wheel with all the various mission rooms arranged inside its circumference. To complete his tasks and expand the base's facilities, Jan must explore the alien world's surface for resources. But he's on a schedule: a nearby sun will rise on the planet in a few days, destroying everything. 

At face value, The Alters looks like a survival/base-building game—which it is, but only to a limited degree. While you do explore and mine, these elements are kept very basic because this is not a survival game. Likewise, the base-building system is intentionally simple because this is not a base-building game. It is—would you believe it—a relationship game.

Jan is just a builder and doesn't have the skills or enough hands to run the large mobile base. He thus creates extra help by cloning himself. Now, there are many games where you create clones to help with tasks. But The Alters is different. Jan doesn't simply copy himself. To cultivate the right skills, the cloning system looks at Jan's life choices and then branches one of those into a new destiny. The new clone has an entirely different lived experience and, thus, perspective.

For example, Jan had an abusive father. He fled the scene, choosing to go to college, leading to different choices in his life. Yet the clone you create in the demo, Technician Jan, chose to stay home and eventually threw his father out. That led to very different choices as well as a very different personality. Satre would have loved this idea.

As the main Jan, you must build a rapport with your clones, looking at both their shared and unique memories, and then choosing your responses to win them over. I have no interest in relationship gameplay, yet the interactions with Jan's clone captivated me. Things will get interesting as more clones arrive, requiring befriending them and possibly handling conflicts between the different personalities.

I also thoroughly enjoyed exploring the barren planet, rendered in stunning detail and almost grotesque alien beauty and filled atmospherically by an eerie soundtrack. And even though I love a detailed and grindy survival/base-building experience, I appreciate the light applications of these elements that kept them enjoyable without overwhelming the other gameplay systems.

📽 Demo Moment: This game is pretty but eerie

This game mixes exploring our choices and agency with exploring an alien planet, wrapped delicately in a sci-fi survival experience that is not too demanding yet still very enjoyable. I came into the demo expecting to build a giant base and dig up minerals, not to have a touching engagement between Jan and his clone over their mom's cooking. And yet, that was one of my favourite parts of the experience. 

The Alters is sci-fi at its best: using the exotic extremes of alien circumstances to explore the human condition. It delves into that eternal question: do our choices really matter? And it delivers some surprising answers wrapped inside a really cool game. 

As Satre once said, "Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

The Alters releases in 2024, on Steam.

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Explore The Game with Youtube Chapters:

• 📽 00:51 Sombre thoughts

• 📽 02:25 Prologue

• 📽 04:37 An alien world

• 📽 06:18 Whose capsule is that?

• 📽 07:40 The mobile base

• 📽 08:48 Sole survivor

• 📽 09:30 Run!

• 📽 10:55 Inside the base

• 📽 11:48 A remote call

• 📽 16:30 Day 2

• 📽 16:53 Exploring outside

• 📽 18:59 Collecting minerals

• 📽 20:12 Base building

• 📽 21:05 Crafting

• 📽 22:51 This soundtrack is eerie

• 📽 23:06 Rapidium?

• 📽 24:48 Surveying for minerals

• 📽 25:58 Placing power pylons

• 📽 29:30 Day 3

• 📽 29:57 Mining

• 📽 35:12 Let's clone something!

• 📽 39:25 Broken base

• 📽 41:47 Memories...

• 📽 51:03 Let's clone Jan

• 📽 53:16 Meet the first alter

• 📽 1:00:07 The journey

• 📽 1:03:30 Technician Jan is unhappy

• 📽 1:07:51 Alternative memories

• 📽 1:10:19 Trying to relate

• 📽 1:15:39 We need more clones

• 📽 1:18:47 Game trailer

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