The Alters review - a half-hearted gesture to a question never answered

One of my alters is hurt. He's being torn apart by what he is, both physically and mentally, and isn't sure if he can take the strain of existing in this body. He takes a drastic step in the night and needs urgent medical attention. I approach him, wanting to offer comfort; I think I know how he feels, after all - I'm him. Standing at the side of the infirmary bed, I select the only dialogue option: "I can see you've been a little tense lately."

The Alters is a third-person 'emotional sci-fi' survival game from 11 Bit Studios, creator of the wonderful Frostpunk and the depressing but equally fascinating This War of Mine. The Alters attempts to blend survival, exploration, and base building, tying it together with an ambitious story filled with choice and consequence. Sadly, in trying to do all of these things, it ends up doing none of them well.

You play as Jan Dolski, a manual laborer on a spaceship tasked with finding an ultra-rare resource called Rapidium, which I'm told can solve the food shortages on Earth. Something goes awry, and Jan finds himself all alone on an alien planet with no idea how to complete his mission, maintain the mobile base, or get back home.

The only option is to create alternate versions of Jan capable of completing the tasks he cannot. Luckily, there's a quantum computer on board that can extrapolate what and who he might have become if he had made different life choices. Using these new Jans, the titular alters, I'm expected to complete the mission as intended. Sounds perfectly reasonable.

Alas, The Alters is almost immediately at odds with itself, as it's neither one thing nor the other. The resource management, the mining, and the exploration don't mesh with the story elements. Neither is strong enough to stand on its own, and they often detract from each other, acting as artificial roadblocks to whatever comes next. Postponing what seems like an important story beat to mine organic matter so you can craft a radiation filter for your base feels bad, but not in the way it's supposed to.

The challenge of The Alters is to manage resources, at least from what I can see. Organic material, metals, even my time are precious resources, and cannot be squandered lest I find myself in a pickle. There were several times when, through mismanagement, I found myself in a no-win scenario. Frustrated and annoyed, I would have to load a save from an earlier day and try again, which is fine in a game wholly about streamlining automated processes but a real pisser in one with story beats about mopey clones.

The ticking clock isn't only my internal frustration meter; the impending sunrise (thankfully, not a daily occurrence) would, I'm told, vaporize the base and everyone in it. Because of this, we can't stay in one place for too long, forcing us to move and set up new mining stations and a fresh pylon network.

Exploring more of this alien world should give me a thrill, but I'm instead bored by repeating what I did before, only on an increasing scale. On-foot traversal is cumbersome and limited. I can't climb without energy, and I need to construct more pylons and mining stations to harvest my surroundings, all of which require more scavenging, more refining, more busywork. It's an ouroboros of faff. I must complete mindless tasks to craft materials in order to complete more mindless tasks.

I wouldn't mind if the legwork I put in when entering a new area built towards something, but unlike games like Factorio and Satisfactory, I can't reach a state of true automation; ironically, even though I can create life, the manpower I have to hand is far too limited to make that happen. Even with a full complement of alters, I can't reach a state where my base runs itself.

Setting up priorities or giving my crew a few areas to call their own would have lent a feeling of harmony to the base,  with my (somehow) mismatched group working together towards a common goal. Instead, I get a mad dash to whatever the next objective is. While this is presumably intended to highlight the direness of my situation, it mostly comes across as busywork without leading to any improvement. I fear, though, that without this, there wouldn't be much of a game here at all.

The game's strict deadlines make caring about anything else difficult. I'm supposed to connect with these alters that I've created, wrestle with the moral quandary of their existence, maybe even make a friend or two, but by the second area, I was only concerned about creating someone who could refine materials a bit better.

That in itself could have been a thread to pull on. Are my alters people? They have lived lives before today, albeit artificial ones, but for all intents and purposes, they are real, and I'm using them to cook meals in the kitchen. Much like a lot of questions The Alters poses, possible answers are touched on but never sufficiently explored. I talk to Technician Jan, my first alter, who is furious about being a clone, reeling from the revelation that his past life was a lie. After a few minutes of fuming, he suggests we create more alters, because why not?

Many of the new versions of Jan are hilariously unique. A divergence of Jan's formative years somehow produced a scientist with a genius-level intellect. I appreciated him for being one of the few level-headed alters, but the difference between him and the original Jan is borderline ridiculous. I'm told, with a completely straight face, that this is one of his possible routes not taken.

The alters' design, their clothes, the way they speak - they're just caricatures. The manual laborers are all gritty hard-knocks from the wrong side of the tracks. They drink beer and listen to rock music. The scientist, however, is arrogant and distant, and he only listens to AI-created jazz, because of course.

The conversations I shared with these alters feel extremely stilted, shallow, and rarely go anywhere. Original Jan doesn't have an inquisitive mind; he almost seems disinterested in others' backstories, with the writing not being strong enough for this to translate as embarrassment over his own life, which I assume was the aim. He comes across as a bit of a dick, honestly, and isn't very pleasant to be around. None of the alters are.

The Alters' disparate parts finally come together in the ending, and I enjoyed seeing the fruits of our labour despite the fairly predictable story beats (you mean to tell me the corporation I work for might not be morally good?). But this made the faff in the middle feel even more like a means to an end than a worthwhile experience in and of itself. I'd be interested in seeing other possible outcomes, but the thought of another 25 hours mining metals sends a shiver down my spine.

It's all too flat. The more questions The Alters poses, the less it has to say, and it's a game that insists on telling, never showing. From uninspiring, frustrating exploration to a surface-level story, I can't see this being for anyone other than those who love deadlines and suffering.