The Alters brings Kojima-esque weirdness to a tale of sci-fi survival

The Verge

2 days ago

Rolling across rugged alien wilds, your circular base in The Alters offers a twinkling haven from the whipping winds and nauseating radiation. At least, that's how it feels for the first few hours. Gradually, as the in-game days stack up, my view of the vessel changes: protagonist Jan Dolski seems to be stuck on what is essentially a very expensive, very large hamster wheel, eking out an existence within modular rooms that look a lot like shipping containers. For the corporation funding this venture, Ally Corp (pah!), Jan and his crewmates are just like the resources they're seeking to extract: commodities.
The hamster wheel stylings of your ship evoke the visual storytelling of filmmaker Bong Joon-ho: the speeding train in Snowpiercer, or the repetitive clone deaths of Mickey 17, each distilling class and the flow of capital into raw images. This should tell you something about how ambitious and frequently weird this sci-fi game is. In part, The Alters is a base-building survival experience of the kind that developer 11 Bit Studios received plaudits for with the Frostpunk series.
But there's a wrinkle: in The Alters, you're directing Jan about the ship, getting him to interact with menus rather than seeing everything from the omniscient top-down perspective. Beyond your base walls, the game snaps into a third-person action-exploration mode as you comb the ravishing extraterrestrial planet for resources, and maybe even the key to life itself.
Twenty minutes in, the game evokes another modern great, Hideo Kojima, when you build the most important — and weirdest — room in the whole game: the Womb. Using a shimmering, highly volatile substance called Rapidium, Jan, the sole surviving member of the original crew, is able to replicate himself thanks to a scientific breakthrough involving the multiple universes theory. It sounds heady but is straightforward enough in practice: Jan punches the 'alter' that he wants to create into a quantum computer and out pops an all-new, yet strangely familiar, assembly of flesh and bones. There is Jan Botanist, Jan Miner, Jan Doctor, and more. Each represents a fork in the space-time continuum of the original Jan's life. Conveniently, each is also suited to a particular task on the massive rotating mining vessel.
The game quickly settles into the min-maxing groove typical of survival games. Such are the demands of the economy on default difficulty, it feels as if you need to optimize every single second of the game's 24-hour day-and-night cycle. Jan Botanist gets to work making veggies in the garden, then rustles up nourishing meals in the kitchen. Jan Refiner processes the raw materials; Jan Scientist researches new technologies in his lab. The day's labor consumes your attention with its pleasing machinic rhythm. Outside, 11 Bit flexes its art chops with considerable verve. Gnarled, tree-like rock formations curl across the arid terrain; matter swirls within shimmering physics-defying anomalies; a vast cosmic sea churns menacingly.
Everything is running smoothly until — oh no! — it's not. The crew are peeved, overworked, and understandably terrified. So you build a gym, social room, and, in true corpo-hell style, a contemplation room. Get the exercise endorphins flowing, kick back and watch a movie (which are live-action shorts by comedy sketch duo Chris & Jack), or play a few rounds of beer pong. Your crew's anxiety fades; their designs on rebellion dissipate.
Fittingly, for a game that can be read as an exploration of dissociative identity disorder, The Alters has its own split personality: the actual work of maintaining your base and the interactions that emerge between your crew. The former can become rote; the latter provide moments of spontaneous drama. One touching early-game scene involves the death of a sheep, the initial test subject for the Womb. Your crew are gutted; they decide to hold a wake honoring the doe-eyed Molly. She was a friend, after all. Despite the psychedelic strangeness of their creation, this oddball assortment of Jans are still human, possessing an innate desire for ritual.
Elsewhere, the script doesn't quite sparkle. Original Jan asks his alters the same set of control questions each time they emerge from the Womb, moving through clockwork beats of dismay and outrage as the new arrivals grapple with the baffling nature of their existence. Indeed, as the hours accrue, the conversations naturally take on a kind of eerie, echoey feel, such is the way that Jan is, in essence, talking to himself. The result is a kind of maddeningly claustrophobic nightmare — and perhaps not wholly in the way 11 Bit necessarily intended.
There are exciting, sometimes downright devious decisions to make, like choosing between the unscrupulous company you work for or an unhinged scientist to solve a deadly health issue (goodness knows how long I umm ed and ahh ed on that one). Beyond such big, plot-altering choices, you'll spend most of your time agonizing over actions befitting your role as the ship's de facto boss. Are you getting in extra gym equipment solely because it will brighten Refiner Jan's day or because it will make him fitter, happier, and more productive?
11 Bit has long explored questions of labor, notably in its Frostpunk games, but the zoomed-in, up-close-and-personal perspective of The Alters successfully reframes them — and in timely fashion. Recent years have shown starkly how most real-world corporations (including those that make and publish video games) feel about their workers: i.e., as an inherently disposable resource, especially when firing them presents an opportunity to swell profits.
In outer space, this disposability becomes existential. Original Jan, and all the other Jans, feel the supercharged, life-and-death stakes of their precarious predicament. Not all of them will make it, spending their final moments toiling under the yoke of corporate labor. They are reduced and then, in turn, extinguished — their bodies considered little more than grist for the cosmic mill.