The Alters Review – Sci-Fi Space mining gone wrong

The Alters is a new sci-fi game from 11 bit studios – makers of Frostpunk and This War of Mine – which blends exploration with base building, crafting, and survival, all while delivering a compelling story where the decisions you make truly matter. In some ways, The Alters punches well above its weight. You’ll find yourself addicted to its gameplay loop, and the story genuinely makes you interested to find out the mysteries it presents. But in other ways, The Alters can be a frustrating game that backs you into a corner. Is it worth your hard earned time and money? Let’s dive deeper with our review of The Alters. 

You are Jan Dolski, an astronaut who starts the game in media res hurtling towards a planet ina space capsule. You land and when you get outside the capsule, you realise the crew and captain didn’t make it but your big wheel-shaped base did. There’s a storm you have to rush for the base for shelter. Once you get there you try to establish comms with your home base, and weird broken messages from unknown source tell you there’s a sun heading your way that will destroy you unless you move your wheel around the planet. Time starts ticking down at this point and the game truly begins. 

Your goal is to look for an enigmatic resource called rapidium that can apparently save mankind, and you’ve been sent there by a corporation to look for it. Before long, you build a womb, then use rapidium to clone first a sheep then yourself in different timelines. You do this by going to the quantum computer, which allows you to see your “mind memories”, which is a branching timeline of all the most important parts of your life. Your alters are versions of you that made different decisions at key points and thus ended up with different skills and jobs, like scientist, botanist, technician, and more. The various alters have buffs that can help in a certain area, one example being increased growth rate for plants as the botanist. Your alters will crew the base, and are crucial to your survival.

The game is actually quite heavy on the plot, and Jan’s background is quite a traumatic one, involving an alcoholic father and the decision to run away and leave his sick mother to deal with him. These events are actually talking points between your alters onboard the wheel, and it’s no surprise then that all of your alters have different personalities based on their lived experiences, and they even criticise you for the decisions you made compared to them. Talking to your Alters about their problems and keeping them happy is a huge part of maintaining stability at your base. At one point, one of my alters got depressed and cut his own arm off because I failed to notice the warning signs that he was spiraling out of control. Maintaining order in the base is imperative because you cannot complete the objectives and survive alone, so you’ll need to dedicate time to the side missions that involve your alters, like making pierogies together. 

Inside the base is a 2D view like Fallout Shelter and this war of mine. Can be built, adapted, upgraded with modules from storage to social rooms and dorms and way more. These rooms can be functional, like a refinery, but they can also be recreational like the gym that helps your alters blow off steam. As you play, you’ll need more space and upgrades, and how you lay out the different rooms in your base will affect how much space you have to work with. Adding more rooms also makes the base more difficult to move, so the more you build, the more resources you need when it’s time to move to a new locations.

When you leave the base to explore the planet is when you can find resources to mine. You simply have to find an area where a resource is, place probes that show you what’s under the ground, and then keep placing these probes until you find the deep vein with all the goodies. Then you build a mining station there and connect it back to your base with electricity pylons. Mining stations have to be manned by you or your alters to produce materials, which means you really need to know what you’re building next and what resources you need to gather, or you might get caught without radiation filters in a solar storm that kills your entire crew. When you mine, time speeds up too, which means you don’t have to painstakingly mine in real time. Mining stations also act as fast travel points, allowing you to quickly move around the map, which is a great feature and alleviates a lot of the boredom of similar games that force you to trek back and forth. The stations you build also have recharge stations for your suit’s batteries, which get depleted when you perform actions, such as using the grappling hook to reach new places. There’s a real sense of progress in the planet exploration, and these permanent stations allow you to jump in near where you left off exploring without too much fuss. 

Once you establish communications with your home base and let them know you found rapidium, your overarching goal is to build a rapidium ark so that the corporate rescue team can come and collect it and take it home – the only catch is the rescue team is going to take a while to get there. And remember that sun we talked about? It keeps chasing you around the planet, forcing you to move your base periodically. This adds to the growing list of objectives, because if you don’t move in time, it’s game over. Moving the base also ties into your overall objectives. For example, at one point, you can’t move your base because of a chasm full of lava, so you need to build a bridge across it, but that requires a lot of resources and exploration, which has to be done before the sun cooks your crew like burgers on a barbecue. So, you can see how all of these small objectives start adding up: keep your alters happy, move the base, and complete the overarching missions. Oh, and your ex keeps calling to talk to you as well, how typical. If you’re thinking, “hey that sounds like a lot of stuff to do when there’s a real day-night cycle and a time limit”, then you’d be correct. And that’s because the game is deliberately designed like that. You WILL have to prioritize what’s important to you because there literally is not enough time in the day to do it all. 

The team at 11 bit studios have said that that’s because the game is designed to be replayed, allowing you to make different choices, which do genuinely shape outcomes. Are you going to listen to your corporate overlords who are jonesing to get their hands on the rapidium you found? Or are you going to fob them off with excuses and go rogue? All of the choices you make affect not only your alters but the outcome of the game. 

However, it’s not all smooth sailing, and there are some downsides to The Alters that significantly impacts the enjoyment of the game. For example, the order in which you create alters matters, and having the scientist is NECESSARY to the game’s progression but the game doesn’t tell you that. If you don’t create the scientist first then your whole run is pointless. At one point, you need the scientist to research a way to get around an obstacle, so progression stops unless you make him. The scientist also researches upgrades for the ship, but the game doesn’t make that clear until it’s too late, so you could very well spend your resources on making other crew members and get yourself in a jam. The game also autosaves every night when you sleep, but deleted any saves older than around a week, meaning if decisions you made a while ago got you into a bind, then you’re tough out of luck and need to start the game all over again. 

Another negative point about The Alters is that it gets overwhelming. There’s a whole bunch of different minerals to mine, exploration to do, base repairs, feeding alters in kitchen, stop them fighting, answer calls from the corporation, sort things out with your ex wife, survive magnetic storms, complete quests, refine materials, obtain new schematics – it just gets very very complicated, and you’ll find that the bulk of the game is spent rushing around and putting out proverbial fires. This creates a kind of V shape in the game’s pacing, because the start and end of the game are full of interesting plot points where you learn more about Jan Dolski and his story, but there are vast chasms in the game where you have to grind and explore to complete a bazillion side objectives and it ends up wearing a little thin if you’re not prepared. For instance, you might just set out to explore, then realise you haven’t changed the radiation filter, so you fast travel back to base only to find out you don’t have the basic materials, so you go mine them because your alters are taking care of other things. Then you go back to base, make the radiation filter, then realise there aren’t enough meals for the next day. So you go and farm organics, make 4 plates of mush for the crew, and by that time it’s time to go to sleep because you’ve become exhausted. The problem is that you haven’t actually progressed in the exploration you needed to do for the main objective, and all the while the sun is getting closer. Yes, the point of the game IS to plan these things out, but there’s so much to do that The Alters becomes frustratingly tough at points. 

The Alters is both a compelling breath of fresh air and a frustratingly overwhelming experience. 11 Bit Studios have certainly come up with a compelling sci-fi premise, setting, and story that really does make you want to find out more about Jan and the world that the game is set in. It discusses interesting questions around how unique humans really are and corporate greed, and the branching dialogue and decision-making systems truly matter, affecting how your crew behaves. The combination of third person exploration and 2D base management and survival is quite unique, and makes for a fun time for the most part. The Alters is also fully polished, with excellent voice acting, graphics, and performance. This is especially great considering the game retails for around $35 (region dependent). So, in a lot of ways, The Alters and its development team should be commended for punching well above their weight, because this does feel like a AAA, $70 experience. 

However, The Alters quickly becomes a victim of itself. Managing the mental health of 3 or more Alters, mining resources, exploring, receiving calls, fixing the base, expanding the base, moving the base, and completing main objectives before the sun destroys you becomes frustratingly overwhelming. Add to this the autosave system that only saves around 7 days and once per night and you’d be forgiven for thinking Fromsoftware’s Miyazaki stuck his head around the corner at 11-bit studios and said “make it harder”. The fact that the scientist is so essential to the game but the player isn’t really told that only adds to how annoying this game becomes. There’s a line between finding things out for yourself and wasting the players time, and this game steps over that point sometimes. This is a real shame, because I started off, and finished, my time with The Alters really enjoying it, but I couldn’t get past the points where it made me want to give up; made me feel like I was in middle-management in an office, just trying to put out fires and go home unscathed.