The Alters review – unlike anything you’ve ever played

You’re stranded on an alien planet, and it’s a matter of days until the sun crests the horizon and turns you to dust. The definitely-not-evil corporation you work for sent you and the crew there to mine an element called rapidium, but you’re the only survivor after your ship broke apart in orbit, spilling its guts across miles of the planet's surface and killing everyone onboard but you. 

It starts like an action game. You explore the beach from a third-person perspective, sprinting across volcanic sands past the violent, stormy waves, ducking under alien cliffsides made of chunky basalt pillars jutting out at impossible angles as if some leviathan swept away the rock. That’s when night falls and your radiation detector begins to crackle. You pick up the pace and twist and turn across switchbacks in the canyon wall, through the cracked, stony mouths of the cliffside. 

Eventually, you see it. A giant wheel rimmed with lights. A beacon. Safety. Your mobile base. The only place on this planet that’s safe from radiation, and only then if you keep it stocked with rad filters. 

You step inside, and the camera switches to a side-on view like an ant colony – instantly familiar to anyone who’s played XCOM. You’ll spend about half of your time here and the other half exploring, fighting anomalies, and mining materials to improve your mobile base as you flee across the planet from the encroaching sun. 

The Alters is a strange mix of genres, but it works surprisingly well. It’s not as accomplished an action game as pure action games, it’s not as deep as the best strategy games, and it doesn’t have the sheer number of choices you get in a Telltale game, but it does marry all three of those things in a way I’ve never seen before. 

As well as building your base and managing resources, you need to recruit help. But everyone’s dead, so there’s only one thing for it: clones. Using rapidium and the quantum computer, you see the protagonist’s life stretched out in a series of connected synapses, each a core memory. Would you be different if you made another choice at a critical juncture? The Alters believes so. The Jan you play as is a builder, but his clones can be scientists, doctors, miners, security guards, therapists, and plenty more, each with their quirks and vices. Each a distinct personality. Are they people? That’s one of the core moral dilemmas the game asks. 

No part of The Alters is more important than the other. Don’t keep on top of your people management and you could end up with an interpersonal conflict that cascades and creates infrastructure or resource issues. Don’t have enough resources and you could end up creating discord that leads to other issues. Don’t manage their needs with the right facilities in the base building and, well, you get the point. 

There’s a lot of pressure in The Alters because time ticks away, whether you’re spending it well or not. A real-life second is a minute, and each minute brings you closer to night, which means you’re fatigued and the outside world gets filled with deadly radiation. Each day that passes brings you closer to the sunrise, which means death, so your mobile base needs to be ready to move when the day comes. 

The ship’s quantum computer is broken and you’re running low on food. You need metals to fabricate some new equipment because you need to break through a rock wall, and you need to craft a drill to mine the ore on the other side. By the way, everything is falling apart. Two of your crewmates are arguing and one hates you because you made a choice they didn’t like. Mutiny seems likely, but you think you have more pressing matters, like ensuring everyone doesn’t die of starvation. It’s stressful, hectic, and brilliant. 

If you manage the needs of your crewmates well, each has something to teach you about yourself and gives you a new dialogue option to use in future conversations. In turn, completing objectives and unlocking these personality traits open up more options down the road, including more choices when it comes to the final week and making your decision at the climax. I haven’t felt this locked in at the end of a game since the Mass Effect 2 suicide mission. 

From its philosophical musings to its management and exploration, The Alters pulls you in from the opening and refuses to let go. It has the same quality of a good strategy game where real life hours get sucked away as you tick off tasks and work towards goals, but it’s even more engaging because you want the answers to all of its mysteries, too. Minus some iffy technical performance – frames drop in certain areas, and there’s some strange flickering around character models occasionally – it’s brilliantly executed, completely original, and just the right level of stressful. 

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