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The Alters is a fascinating mash-up of survival management and confronting your own multiverse life choicesAt long last, I’ve seen 11 bit Studio’s new game in action, and it’s a doozy
At long last, I’ve seen 11 bit Studio’s new game in action, and it’s a doozy
Image credit:11 bit Studios
Image credit:11 bit Studios
What exactly isThe Alters? It’s a question I’ve been itching to get answers to ever sinceFrostpunkand This War Of Mine developers 11 bit Studiosfirst announcedtheir strange new game at notE3 last year. Until now, all we’ve had to go on is a cryptic CGannouncement trailerthat showed a gaggle of identical clone-looking men in bright pink medical gowns, all of whom seemingly live inside a giant wheel full of shipping containers. It didn’t really tell us anything about what the game actually is, or how it plays, and we’ve heard precious little about it since.
Happily, I’ve now seen about an hour of The Alters in action at this year’s Gamescom, and first impressions are very promising. This is indeed a game about sort-of clones living in a big wheely shipping container, but these containers are actually modules you’ll be building in XCOM/Fallout Shelter-style chunks to advance the capabilities of your big wheel base as you work to escape the broiling heatdeath that’s slowly enveloping the planet. You’ll also be venturing out onto the planet’s surface to gather resources, all while managing your crew of clo- sorry, alternate selves - as you assign their daily work tasks, and then there’s the fact that, well, you’re all chuffing different versions of the same person and the literal embodiment of what your life might have been like if you’d done X instead of Y, or Y instead of Z. It’s a fascinating blend of ideas, and if 11 bit can stick the landing, I reckon it could end up being something really quite special. Here’s everything I learned.
The Alters | Game TrailerWatch on YouTube
The Alters | Game Trailer
Construction happens in a side-on view of your wheel, but you’re able to walk around inside the base as well as you go about your daily duties. |Image credit:11 bit Studios
It’s a thrilling premise, but that’s not even the half of it. In this world, Jan’s corpo overlords have built a machine that lets you replicate yourself - not as a simple like-for-like clone, but as an Alter, a completely distinct, Sliding Doors-style multiverse version of yourself from an alternate timeline. You explore these formative life choices in the machine’s very literal Tree Of Life menu, which shows how Jan’s life would have turned out at key branching decision moments.
You’ll get to pick exactly what Alters you want to bring into being as you progress through the game, and part of itsstrategywill be deciding what skills you need from them versus what type of personality they have. If Jan had decided to never leave his hometown, for example, he would have become a miner like his father, albeit with a more severe drug problem. In another life, if he’d supported his wife’s fancy new high-flying career and moved abroad with her, he’d have become a botanist and remained married to her, unlike his current timeline where he talked her out of the job and they ended up getting divorced. It’s quite an elegant way of giving you lots of different in-game classes to pick from as you go about managing your base, but it’s the way in which 11 bit are grappling with the moral, ethical and philosophical quandaries of such a setup that I find the most intriguing. More on this in a second, though.
Image credit:11 bit Studios
You’ll use your scanner to triangulate mineral sources underground. |Image credit:11 bit Studios
It’s a neat effect, but it’s not an all-encompassing ‘detective vision’ like we’re used to seeing in games such as Batman and Assassin’s Creed. Rather, Kisilewicz has to lay down individual markers on the ground to triangulate the vein’s position, revealing just a small window at a time as he follows the vein to its glowing origin point. In other words, we have to do some actual detecting, which I’m all for. Luckily, Kisilewicz has a ready made metal extractor to plonk down, but before we can turn it on, we need to connect it to the base to give it the necessary power. To do that, it’s time to build some pylons, which need to be placed at certain intervals across the landscape - a bit likeDeath Stranding’s ziplines, which, yes, I’m not ashamed to say my eyes lit up at this prospect, such was my love for creating a country-wide spider web ofenergised BB Boy slidesin Kojima’s walking sim.
With all that in place, “this now leads us to our most precious resource,” Kisilewicz explains, which is, of course: time. “To work here, or anywhere else, we are spending time,” and this will apply to the resource gathering part of The Alters, as well as building additional modules in your base, and othersurvival-based tasks such as cooking food for tomorrow. Eventually, you’ll get tired and have to go to sleep, though you can chose how long to sleep for if you need more rest. At this particular point in the chapter, we have 11 days left to escape this volcanic region and get to the next area, and as Kisilewicz begins his metal extraction, the in-game clock starts speeding up accordingly.
However, it’s not long before we get a radio call from one of our Alters calling us back to base. It’s our Miner friend, who seems to be having trouble with his arm. When we find him in the base’s kitchen, it turns out that in Jan’s Miner timeline, he lost his arm in an accident. But now this Miner has been decanted Foundation-style into a fully functioning body again, he’s not coping too well with having it back - a kind of reverse phantom pain, you might say. “It’s your arm, not mine,” he says gruffly, and his rising anger levels start manifesting themselves as a kind of swirling vortex in the game’s UI. Admittedly, the presentation of the Alters' emotions looked quite rough and ready in my demo, with what appeared to be placeholder fonts and early asset mock-ups standing in for how it will look in the final game. But even if it wasn’t all that visually stunning in the moment, the intention behind it was clear, offering a kind of Life Is Strange: True Colors-esque mood board to indicate how your dialogue choices will affect the Miner’s mood and the way he’ll react.
Image credit:11 bit Studios
“The Alters are different versions of Jan, and the personality of each one of them comes from a different life choice they’ve made - an alternative to Jan’s life choices,” says Kisilewicz. “The management part of our game is mostly through the dialogue, the way you handle them and interact with them. When there’s a change of emotions in people, you’ll see it, and every dialogue [in this scene] will change the Miner’s motions, so we really have to be careful with what we say.”
Image credit:11 bit Studios
Similarly, some Alters might make requests of you to help improve their living space to make them happier, such as building a gym to help let off some steam, or seeking out specific ingredients so you can cook more nourishing, nutritious food. It sounds like it will be a delicate balancing act, weighing up their emotional needs with the jobs you need them to perform while also dealing with this melting pot of clashing personalities - and the irony is that if anyone goes wrong, you’ve really, quite literally, only got yourself to blame.
“We have this main loop of these problems and creating Alters to solve those problems, whether they’re economical or personal. But with their own personalities, they add new problems to the basket,” Kisilewicz summarises neatly, and when my demo ends with the Miner having done something really quite terrible in the kitchen to that troublesome arm he’s been complaining about the whole time, I really can’t wait to see what other kind of problems we’ll be dealing with when The Alters eventually launches onSteamsometime next year.
For more of the latest news and previews from Gamescom 2023, head to ourGamescom 2023 hub. You can also findeverything announced at Opening Night Liveright here.
