The Alters review: philosophical sci-fi carries this fascinating survival game

Digital Trends

a day ago

The Alters
MSRP
$39.99
Score Details 'The Alters' strong concept and philosophical choices carry a standard survival experience.'
Pros High-concept sci-fi premise
Deep moral choices
Amazing performances
Strong characters
Cons Boilerplate survival mechanics
Gameplay becomes routine
Buy for $39 at Amazon
'Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.'
We've all had those moments where we lose ourselves in thought, pondering the big 'what ifs' of our lives. What if you had followed your childhood dream of becoming a musician? What if you had mustered up the courage to ask out your high school crush? Trying to predict the butterfly effect of those possible scenarios on your life is impossible, but always an interesting thought experiment. The part we tend to focus on in these scenarios is how our choices would change our external circumstances, but rarely do we contemplate how those decisions would have changed who we would become.
Recommended Videos
That's the exact premise The Alters looks to explore in its high-concept sci-fi survival format. In it, players scour a small map for resources, balancing time and materials against a ticking clock and conflicting goals to please a safehouse full of clones. It doesn't break new ground in its survival loop, but the situations that arise from one man trying to live with a group of alternate versions of himself are more than engaging enough to carry a memorable experience.
Me, myself, and I
The premise of The Alters is a perfect blend of simplicity with deep implications. Jan Dolski is the sole survivor of Project Dolly after landing on an unexplored planet rich in a material called Rapidium, which has the unique properties of accelerating growth. With no way to survive on his own, and his corporate overlords not wanting to pass up the opportunity to extract this valuable resource, he uses it to create Alters: clones with memories from alternate life paths the original Jan didn't take.
The Aters isn't afraid to do more than scratch the surface …
Jan's entire life can be viewed on the ship's quantum computer to see all the key moments in his life where there would be potential branches. The first Alter, Jan Technician, is the result of a life in which he didn't go to college and stayed home to care for his mother. As soon as an Alter is created, that branch is fleshed out with a full timeline of their lives leading up to them joining the Dolly Project. That detail isn't just background flavor, either. Despite the utilitarian names for each Alter based on their profession, each Jan has a nuanced personality that you can see hints of in the original Jan that make it all the more believable that he could have been them in another reality.
Bonding with each clone is where The Alters shines brightest. Each Jan will respond differently to events and how you speak to them, as well as clash with the others in natural ways. Each handles the stress and world in believable ways for the unbelievable situation they find themselves in. A Jan Alter who never got divorced will struggle with the fact that his wife never really existed, and feels jealous that he has to share some of his memories with her. Another who lost his arm grapples with a kind of reverse phantom pain when he suddenly has a new one. What's most interesting is seeing what aspects of each Jan, either shared or branching, bring them closer or create friction. It felt incredibly heartfelt seeing the moments this crew of ragtag clones found common ground, but equally compelling to see how one could hate who another became based on a single divergent choice.
The Aters isn't afraid to do more than scratch the surface with all the ripe philosophical questions such a premise can elicit. Whenever an Alter wanted to speak, I would drop whatever I was working on to see what they had to say because I knew it would explore a new angle on the concept that would give me something to chew on hours after I stopped playing.
There are a few other non-Jan characters you speak to over the radio that provide some interesting long-term narrative hooks, but the main attraction is seeing how one key choice in a person's life can lead to a completely different outlook. Then, taking those outlooks, putting them in a box in a perilous situation, and seeing whether or not they can survive. I have to give special praise to Alex Jordan, who rides the perfect line of giving each Jan a distinct voice while clearly being the same person. There's even a musical number that is easily the highlight of the game thanks to his performance.
Race the sun
As a survival game, The Alters has all the familiar trappings of the genre. You need to collect resources, build infrastructure, craft tools and equipment, and upgrade your base. A twist I appreciate here is that The Alters is broken up into acts that change up the location every few hours. Because the sun is so intensely radioactive, you can only spend so long in a given location before needing to move your base to stay out of its rays. This means I wasn't building up a settlement for long-term sustainability, but more of a makeshift situation. That removed a lot of the stress I normally feel to perfectly optimize things in survival crafting games. Instead, the goal is to find the things I need, collect them as quickly as I can, and get out.
What it couldn't do was hide the fact that each location had a 'solution,' since resources only appear in set spots, and you can only place your mining platform in one determined spot within that zone.
Of course, each zone presents a macro issue that needs to be overcome on top of the spinning plates of your Alter's needs, spending resources on the base, and time management. The further into the game I got, the more plates I had to let fall as time and resources became more limited and the demands only got steeper. At first, you will simply need to keep up with food production, but each new stage of the game adds another weight, like radiation storms, base malfunctions, and injuries.
Every task can either be done yourself or assigned to one of your Alters. Some Alters are naturally more skilled at some jobs, such as the Miner being more efficient at mining, but no clone is precluded from doing any task, with the exception of research being exclusive to the scientist. Despite a few handy features like setting minimum amounts of things you want in storage, such as food, radiation filters, and repair kits, there's a lot of micromanagement to be done — and intentionally so. I had to start thinking like a manager over my crew of Jans for what I wanted to delegate and what tasks I would handle.
By the third area, the formula does wear a bit thin.
The major stressor is the base itself. Built within a giant wheel, adding, moving, and removing compartments from your base is a regular occurrence. It is reminiscent of how Resident Evil 4 and its attaché case works, but with a few more restrictions. It feels intentionally designed to force hard choices on the player, especially when you suddenly have to add a bulky room in order to progress and have to decide between ditching storage space or your crew's social room. This all may sound overwhelming, but The Alters doles out each new wrinkle at just the right pace where I felt like I had almost gotten a grip on everything, only for something new to come in and keep me off balance. It kept me in lockstep with Jan feeling right on the verge of disaster from every angle and just barely managing to hold things together.
By the third area, the formula does wear a bit thin. Besides getting more efficient ways to collect resources, you will essentially be doing the same routine of exploring a small zone, uncovering deposits to build mining platforms on, and working to overcome whatever roadblock you've hit while keeping your crew as happy and healthy as possible. It serves its purpose of contributing to the pressure-cooker of a situation where I never had enough time, resources, or space to satisfy everyone, but did start to feel like a chore by the end to keep starting from scratch.
There were times I wished The Alters was a pure adventure game without any of the survival elements, but that friction is what makes it work. While the interpersonal relationships and conflicts between the Jans are the heart of the experience for me, and what I can wholeheartedly recommend, I came to appreciate the basic survival loop as a way to add more agency to all the choices I made. Like all the best sci-fi stories, The Alters will leave you with plenty of philosophical questions to chew on.
The Alters was tested on PS5.