The Alters Review - Seeing Double
With This War of Mine and Frostpunk, developer 11 Bit Studios has garnered a reputation for making games that force you to make challenging decisions. The Alters is a continuation of this pattern, melding a straightforward survival game with management systems designed around making tough calls. But this time, it’s not other people who will face the consequences of your decisions. Instead, The Alters forces you to confront other versions of yourself as you grapple with staying alive and keeping a small population of your clones happy. It’s an intriguing premise that delivers on the studio’s signature style, even if some of its survival systems occasionally get in the way.
You play as Jan Dolski, who wakes up on the shores of a black beach on a planet very far from home. The surroundings are dark and oppressive, with the stark red plumes of smoke from flares and cracking lightning above illuminating your way toward your only refuge; a monolithic wheel with a base suspended inside it. You are alone, and getting back home is going to require gathering a lot of resources. You do this by discovering resource deposits in the area around you, erecting a network of pylons as you explore further and further away from safety, and using it to ferry resources back.
You need a steady supply of metals, minerals, and organics to build better tools, construct additions to your base, and produce food in order to survive. The planet might be foreign, but it has what you need to get home. The only thing that isn’t in abundance is time. As the days tick by, the sunrise creeps closer, spelling doom to anyone caught in its highly radioactive rays.
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