Reader, this review of “The Alters” might be tainted by the fact that I had to restart the game multiple times from early checkpoints. But I promise, I now have a perfectly reasonable explanation for my poor playthrough - I clearly should have allocated the task of playing this game to an alternate version of myself — Anusha (manager). She’s excellent with time management and allocating the best people to relevant tasks, which would have made her great at this game. Casting aside the sci-fi-ness of it all, The Alters is really about resource management in a ship. At first, it made me think it’s a bit like Spiritfarer. But where Spiritfarer is warm, cosy and non-confrontational, The Alters is deeply unsettling, and very, very stressful.
Jan Dolski (original) crash-landed onto a hostile planet. He’s the lone survivor of an expedition that has failed. He needs to get back to Earth, but it is impossible for him to get out of this horrible situation all by himself. So he turns to the only obvious option — make clones of himself. But they aren’t exact duplicates — they’re versions of himself that took different life choices than he did. A point of divergence led them to have a different experience altogether. It’s handy in this situation because Jan can technically just build an entire ship crew filled with his variants that have hyper-specific skills.
Anusha (gamer) is taking over this section of the review. Jan is left with a space base and a scattering of resources around him. He only has a few hours in the day to figure out how to harvest resources, build up his base, and eventually make them strong enough to propel them off the planet. For starters, I created a miner, refiner, scientist, and technician. They are each assigned to their own tasks. I only have so many hours in a day to juggle everything — sending out orders, cooking meals, overseeing base construction, keeping a steady pipeline of new Alters baking in the “womb”, and still finding time to explore the planet. Managing all of this quickly turns stressful.
Anusha (Empath) is taking over this section. In my first run-through I sent my miner into an irradiated resource mine. Within a few days, my Miner died while working. It felt awful, and I felt incredibly guilty - like I’d pushed too hard, ignored warning signs. I kept feeding him medication in the hopes that he would get better and keep working to ensure the base was afloat. This was incredibly revealing about the gameplay — The Alters makes it clear that survival isn’t about gathering resources and keeping machines running. It’s mostly about caring for the people around you - in this case, versions of yourself — that are just as hurt and anxious. You are punished for treating the Alters as mere workers. They need attention. They want conversation, rest, and constant reassurance. They need to be fed and kept healthy. Every so often, I must find them little treats to keep their morale up. For instance, the refiner wants a workout space, and the scientist is happy with a rubber ducky I give him. And often, getting closer to the Alters would even mean Jan having to grapple with the emotions of having to deal with versions of himself that keep showing him “what he could have been if things were different”.
Anusha (Stardew Valley expert) is taking over this section. The Empath has it all wrong — the point of the game is clearly time management. Think of it as discrete tasks that you can execute during your day. The first hour is spent deciding what the spaceship needs and sending out orders. Midday is for exploration and mission objectives. The evening is for socializing and upkeep of base morale. Breaking the game structure down into routine tasks makes everything manageable. Anusha (gamer) and Anusha (empath) need to think about what’s at stake here. They get swept up in emotion or survival panic and lose sight of the clock. Every day is a countdown to destruction on this hostile planet. In one of the playthroughs, the Technician was stretched thin — juggling the workshop and keeping the base functional, and not having the right tasks allocated to him. One day, my Technician ran out of repair modules, and whole sections of the base began to collapse.
The Alters is currently available across consoles — for the PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. I got it for free along with the Xbox PC Game Pass. You might appreciate the game a lot if you’re going through an existential crisis and rethinking choices you’ve made in life.