The Alters is not what I was expecting! Given I now learn about new and upcoming games in a very normal way, I went into it almost blind, knowing absolutely nothing about it, my only prior commentary being, well...
To find it was a very nice-looking sci-fi game with a unique blend of resource and personnel management, with loads of adventure and dialogue layered over the top, was something of a pleasant surprise!
You play as the sole survivor of a deep space accident, waking up on an incredibly hostile alien planet to find the rest of your crew is dead. Your base and transportation are still functional, however, leaving you a finite number of days (Majora's Mask style) to stay alive and reach an extraction point. It's a goal you'll never achieve on your own--the mission was originally designed for a whole crew, after all--so before long you need to build your own crew. By cloning yourself.
Seems like a straightforward solution, only there's a catch, and this is where the name and cover come in: you're not really cloning yourself, you're creating "Alters". The technology in this future has been able to map brain and body alike, charted via core memories (think Inside Out!) revolving around important decisions you've made in your life, from childhood to school and beyond. The Alters lets you revisit those moments and change the outcome, after which a quantum computer simulates the results and spits out a different you.
Physically, it's you, but emotionally each clone can be a wildly different person. You've all got some degree of shared histories--the same parents, broadly similar upbringings--but have also lived essentially different lives. This is a cool trick when talking to your new co-workers, everyone the same yet also not, but it also has a practical consequence, because conveniently all the Alters you grow have been trained in the different jobs you'll need to crew your base, from scientists to technicians to refinery experts.
A big part of The Alters is simply dealing with all of, well, you. The more Alters you create the more they bounce off each other, work themselves into exhaustion, have needs and start fights, and your job as the original is to support everyone, mediate disputes and just generally try to hold the whole operation together.
The other part of the game involves running the base, which means constantly tinkering with a resource and production management system. The Alters has a real-time clock and everyone gets tired, but your base and crew always need fuel and food, and you always need to be building and repairing stuff, so it's essential to try to find a balance between all these competing needs.
This part of the game takes a little while to get your head around; it lives partly as a spreadsheet, with all your numbers and routines and assignments in a menu screen, but it also lives in a 3D space you can directly interact with as a player character. Sometimes because it's more fun to do it that way, plus you often need to leave your base to explore the planet around you, or do some mining.
There are very clear lines between these parts of the game. The team leader stuff is cool, and there are some interesting implementations of it--your ex-wife is on the phone at one point, for example, and you need to find an Alter who can actually talk to her--but a lot of the dialogue is also kinda boring and repetitive, over-written and overly-wordy in a way that had me turning the subtitles on ASAP so I could skip through sections instead of having to sit through entire conversations. The idea of all these Alters is interesting, but not many of the actual guys are.
The resource management stuff is also neat, in the way it can be run mostly from menus but also in person, and juggling everything alongside time and energy levels makes it a constant challenge. But it's also kinda artificial; the game's story often intrudes on your plans, so it never quite feels like a proper resource management game.
Where I really liked The Alters was the way that, thanks to its context and the way both halves of the game related to each other, none of that mattered, because the lines between them ultimately aren't important. Yeah, many of the Alters are boring and talk too much, but these are your workmates, that's incredibly relatable. And given everything else about this game, particularly its emphasis on story, I didn't want it to be a proper resource sim; I appreciate that it's giving me something to do in between conversations that is trying something different to the usual strategy, FPS or RPG approach. I've honestly never played a game like this, and that's a very cool and fun thing to experience.
You're playing as a man stranded, stressed and alone, and there's just enough panic and frustration on the resource side of things that I truly felt those things. And the cloning takes the game's setting and runs with it; as a premise in the universe of The Alters it’s dicey and experimental, so its imperfect implementation is just a reflection of that.
So yeah, I really liked this game! I appreciate fresh swings at familiar genres, I am very into its art design (and menus, which are lovely) and I would love to see more games try interesting new stuff like this.
I still hate the cover though.
