The Alters Is So Much More Than A Game About Clones: Our Preview

Summary The Alters offers a fresh and mesmerizing sci-fi adventure with top-notch visuals and soundtrack.

Developed by 11 Bit Studios (This War of Mine, Frostpunk), the game revolutionizes time management gameplay.

The Alters explores existential sci-fi themes, with clones called Alters showcasing different personalities.

Don’t call The Alters a “game about clones,” because that’s selling it short. The new upcoming release by 11 Bit Studios presents a fresh-feeling and mesmerizing sci-fi adventure, complete with top-notch atmospheric visuals and a magnificent soundtrack that could end up on best-of lists. While certain individual components of The Alters will seem immediately familiar – there's a little The Sims, Duncan Jones’s Moon, maybe a touch of Observation – it's safe to say that they've never been merged together like this before, or leveraged to tell a story that veers between shuffling discomfort, thrilling exploration, and emotional candor.

With the development team responsible for 2014’s hit This War of Mine and 2018's Frostpunk, it’s unsurprising that The Alters is as unconventional as it seems. With their previous games, players submersed themselves in heartbreakingly grim landscapes, drawn from the dire rationing and no-right-moves desperation endemic to survival amid the remnants left by war. Critically acclaimed but notoriously dour and stressful, This War of Mine reframed its themes into a frustrating and enlightening interactive experience, one-of-a-kind and emotionally absorbing, and Frostpunk brought unprecedented narrative heft to city-builders.

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That The Alters follows in their footsteps but with a completely different emotional palette serves as a showcase for 11 Bit Studios’ range, with the game offering an entirely contrasting but no less engrossing experience. Screen Rant had the very fortunate opportunity to test-drive a preview portion on location in Warsaw, walking away inspired and excited by the game’s breadth of scope, delightful strangeness, and clever interactive notions. Or, in brief: The Alters has the unmistakable whiff of a surprise hit.

Jan Stranded After Crash-Landing

The Alters Centers On One Hapless Worker Doing The Job of A Team

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Jan Dolski is having the worst first day at the office. His landing capsule crashes onto a radioactive planet intact, but his entire team wasn't so lucky. Now alone – save for the mysterious garbled voices of authority on the other side of his comms – Jan tries to make the best of a bad situation on the eerie planet’s surface. Apparently responsible for evaluating and establishing a mining concern, Jan makes his way through the jagged stormy landscape until arriving at his new home away from home: an enormous tire encasing a series of modular rooms which can even eventually travel and roll over the environment.

Soon enough, Jan recons the area and sets up some mining and scanning gear, taking quick breaks back at the base to rest and send harried status updates to his superiors. Eventually, he locates a special unstable mineral known as Rapidium, glowing quantum-displaced chunks of matter with a peculiar life-creating utility; this is proffered by corporate as a simple on-the-spot solution for Jan’s otherwise accidental one-man job.

The Alters Are Clones, Albeit With An Important Twist

Jan's Alters Offer Up A Range of Personalities to Contend With

From there on out, The Alters gets expectedly weirder. Now able to create additional pairs of hands, Jan tasks these clone-like, physically similar entities to manage and expedite tasks, each of whom have their own skill buffs and quirks. And, also, they’re all Jan…or, rather, they would be Jan, if he had changed any of the pivotal decisions which make up a life. This is illustrated in the game as twisted threads of pertinent events, able to be shifted around to produce, say, a Jan with higher technological aptitude, or better fit to operate mining equipment.

The Alters quickly becomes a game about conversations and choices, even coersion.

Of course, these “Alters” aren’t mindless robots to be blankly instructed and commanded. They are other complete Jans, living beings with different worldviews, belief systems, tendencies, passions, and pasts, molded by artificial (but no less impactful) past events. Some are more helpful by nature, others need coaxing, others are quick to anger. And, painstakingly, they all have to be compelled to comprehend their role as a duplicate, to understand that they are a mere day old and molded from scratch by a stressed-out scientist out of his depth.

The Alters Are Jans Which Could Have Been

Jan's Doubts, Shames, And Regrets, Boiled Down Into Flesh-And-Blood Twins

The Alters quickly becomes a game about conversations and choices, even coersion, something which becomes apparent the first time Jan interacts with the base’s Quantum Computer using his store of Rapidium. The device presents a life parceled out of difficult conditions and turning points, each based on a choice, each incorporated into the person players meet at the start. A difficult home life saw Jan abandon his abusive parentage, but one where he stood his ground forks the possibilities and opportunities further, theoretically leading to "new Jans," new Alters. Different moves, different selves.

It's heady and existential sci-fi material without a doubt, and The Alters handles it with the sympathy evoked in This War of Mine or in the Warsaw streets of The Thaumaturge, only leveraging utterly different tones and textures. The game is often funny and even awkward, despite the desperation Jan endures as a hapless stooge in the alien environs, to say nothing of the guilt he wears over his hardscrabble existence prior to the start of the game.

Split Personalities That Can Help Do The Washing Up

Each Alter Is Their Own Person, For Better and For Worse

The Alters is also all about its time management elements, with nearly every action in the game eating up priceless minutes and hours of the lesser, safer radiation present in the planet’s daylight, or taxing this resource to 3D-print tools or cook rations. For the latter labors, in lieu of having the player gawk at a screen while Jan putters about a workshop or kitchen endlessly, game time speeds up exponentially, further draining the possibility space of what can be completed in a day, always menacingly tracked by a bar in the lower-left corner of the screen.

We didn’t encounter anything like combat, but this time press does make exploration feel actively stressful and rushed, in the best way possible. Dawdling is dangerous, and time doesn’t freeze when wandering through the base, which sees Jan taking lifts and pacing between rooms while viewed in a fetching 2.5D perspective. There’s a kitchen, bedroom, communications desk, storage units, and various other utilities to interact with, and garnering materials on the planet’s surface empowers the construction of new rooms to Tetris around the limited confines of the base.

There’s an entire sizable game to be made out of just the exploration, resource-gathering, base management, and environmental trailblazing systems in The Alters, but its unexpected emotional core seals any gaps between the myriad gameplay elements and makes them fit smartly together.

And what about the other Jans? They find their own way, either planetside – after being tasked with operating fabricated equipment – or in the rooms and pursuits which spark their interest. Players can pull them aside for a quick convo or to mediate an argument, with the tenor changing dependent on whether he’s forged connections with these Alters in earlier sequences or not. Or maybe some will remain guarded throughout, unable to be swayed?

A technician we created was personally cold and distanced at first, but the Jans eventually bonded over their love of mom’s home cooking. In a manner which comes off as quite eccentric, the other Alters are typically named after their skill buffs; our first created Jan was named “Jan Technician,” a standard which almost comes off as reductively crude but plays into The Alters’ underlying oddness and humor.

A Myriad of Game Mechanics and Ideas

A Fascinating Narrative and Emotional Core Ties The Alters' Multiple Systems Together

There’s an entire sizable game to be made out of just the exploration, resource-gathering, base management, and environmental trailblazing systems in The Alters, but its unexpected emotional core seals any gaps between the myriad gameplay elements and makes them fit smartly together. We found the game’s explorable areas also open up, even early into the preview, though each map’s boundaries fail to seem entirely coherent at times.

The exploration and mining busywork all have a nice tactile quality, and the oppressive weather and weird radiation found topside generates beautiful glowing vistas, with the base feeling like a bastion of quiet comfort in the chaos. There’s maybe a smack of Death Stranding, too, in terms of Jan’s lonely wanderings over the planet, or the ability to connect pylons between stations that provide fast-travel options, though these seem to be discarded once Jan moves on to the next location via the wheeled base.

Surveying requires a curious scanning minigame where players color the planet's surface in search of deep deposits, and climbing tools help Jan scale higher plateaus. New tools can be researched, unlocked, and fabricated at the base, with other relevant Jans hopefully pitching in. Since this is never promised, one wonders if they can be dispatched as easily as they were created.

Final Thoughts On The Preview

Where Does The Alters Stand Among Ambitious Game Designs

The studio could have just played it straight and made a kind of nightmarish sci-fi thriller with the pieces on hand. While The Alters certainly has small touches of intergalactic horror, it’s blended with cozy life sim tropes, surreal humor, and stranger-in-a-strange-land adventure. The banter over the comms desk is always enigmatically dark and, even after three hours in its world, The Alters still seems rich with the mysteries hidden well past the preview.

All of this could work on its own, but 11 Bit Studios’ finely-detailed art direction and compelling soundtrack beautifully encases the resultant experiment. With voice work by veteran Alex Jordan –performing a thus-far commendable attempt at carrying multiple personalities on the screen a la Dee Bradley Baker – The Alters’ shaky comradery and uncanny sci-fi weirdness feel tethered and sympathetic, the perfect lure for a unique sci-fi experiment from the studio who once tasked players with sending children to the mines.

The Alters is expected to release later this year on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.