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The Star
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Finding yourselves in a gloriously stressful sci-fi adventure
What are the events that made you who you are? Do you fixate on the contingencies, or the ostensible hand of fate that drove you to this particular place in space-time? How do you make sense of your regrets, your self-justifications, your burdens, your excuses? The Alters is a game about a man physically confronted with such questions. To survive on a remote planet, he must learn to live with the other selves he might have been, radically different incarnations who share Jan Dolski's exact DNA but have their own personalities and talents. After beginning in a cliche fashion, the latest effort by 11 Bit Studios, the Polish developer behind Frostpunk and This War Of Mine , blossoms into an extraordinary survival game that explores miscommunication, human fallibility and conflicting motivations. At the start, Jan finds himself the sole survivor of a space mining expedition on the behalf of Ally Corp. Soon after exiting his lifepod, he discovers a deposit of 'rapidium', the most valuable substance in the universe yet one whose properties are scarcely understood. Then, upon returning to his ship, Jan learns he is in imminent danger: The radiance of a too-close star will soon char him into ash. Heeding the instructions from a colleague on Earth, Jan also discovers the most personal information imaginable on the ship's quantum computer: a form of searchable memories that chart all the pivotal decisions that led him to enlist in Ally Corp's space mission. Rushed for time but lacking the technical know-how to get his ship moving, Jan initiates a branching procedure on the computer that allows him to select an alternative life path. Using the rapidium, which is known to hasten organic growth, he births another self in the ship's medical wing, known as 'the womb'. But Jan Dolski, the technician, is far from enthusiastic when he realises what's going on. He resents Jan Dolski, the builder. For his life choices. For using him as a means to an end. To escape the fatal starlight, Jan must gather resources that can be converted into food, fuel and building materials. Doing so entails exploring the outside terrain for resource deposits, then setting up mining stations and powering them via pylons to the ship. The environmental design is excellent, and wiring up a far-flung deposit can feel as satisfying as taking down a nemesis in another game. But there is only so much that can be crammed into a space day. You have to be ruthlessly efficient, lest you find yourself, as I did at various points, having to backtrack several days to get things on track. Fair warning: The Alters will let you fall on your face. By contrast with so many games that urge perfectionism – high scores, low times, no-hit runs, etc – it wants you to embrace your errors and remember that out of mistakes, good things can happen. 'What was really important for us was to create the life of Jan Dolski from our own experiences and our own loaded questions,' the game's director, Tomasz Kisilewicz, told me. Early in the game's five-year development cycle at 11 Bit Studios, the developers were polled internally about the what-ifs that have haunted them. 'For one person, it's 'What if I never left my hometown?' For somebody else, 'What if I took this business opportunity or didn't drop out of college?'' Kisilewicz said. The most emotional ones, he said, were about relationships. ''What if I proposed?'' By the third act, I had created four other alters to assist Jan: a biologist, a scientist, a refinery operator and a miner. (Other options include a doctor, guard, worker and shrink.) Aside from the refiner – a laid-back, wellness-oriented guy – the others are prickly in their own way. Try as I might, I couldn't help but court their animosity when I irked them with my conversational choices or decisions. The feelings of tension were mutual. Oh, how I shuddered inside whenever I heard some variation of 'Jan, got a moment?' while immersed in some time-sensitive task. Rarely has a game filled my head with duties that felt so pressing. At almost any given moment, there is something to fret over: Is there enough inventory space? Are there enough resources to build? Is the ship adequately protected against radiation? Is there enough food? Are there enough repair kits to fix things on the ship? During our conversation, I told Kisilewicz that I was especially impressed with the adversaries Jan encounters that aren't hostile-minded aliens. There are spatial anomalies that float in the air like astral jellyfish, irradiating Jan if he comes into contact – or, in their most fearsome form, causing time to speed up if he remains in their vicinity. Kisilewicz explained that those who worked on The Alters refrained from trying to devise large-scale combat scenarios for practical reasons: the game had a small development team. They also didn't want to detract from the personal story they wanted to tell. Along with CD Projekt Red, the makers of The Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 , 11 Bit Studios has helped catapult Poland into the vanguard of the gaming industry. Kisilewicz was clear-minded about the country's particular cultural influence on The Alters. 'It brings this Polish flavour of touching tough things and not shying away from bad endings, from bad outcomes,' he said. The Alters is a first-class resource management game that I found rewardingly stressful to play. This is not a game where the good, bad and neutral conversation options are signposted. Some alters may react negatively to a gesture of empathy or curiosity. Sometimes there aren't any good choices. Jan's journey is marked by pressing ethical concerns. They invite players to reflect on their own priorities, and to ponder what we owe others and what we owe ourselves. – ©2025 The New York Times Company (The Alters was reviewed on the PlayStation 5. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.) This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
New York Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Finding Yourselves in a Gloriously Stressful Sci-Fi Adventure
What are the events that made you who you are? Do you fixate on the contingencies, or the ostensible hand of fate that drove you to this particular place in space-time? How do you make sense of your regrets, your self-justifications, your burdens, your excuses? The Alters is a game about a man physically confronted with such questions. To survive on a remote planet, he must learn to live with the other selves he might have been, radically different incarnations who share Jan Dolski's exact DNA but have their own personalities and talents. After beginning in a cliché fashion, the latest effort by 11 Bit Studios, the Polish developer behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine, blossoms into an extraordinary survival game that explores miscommunication, human fallibility and conflicting motivations. At the start, Jan finds himself the sole survivor of a space mining expedition on the behalf of Ally Corp. Soon after exiting his lifepod, he discovers a deposit of 'rapidium,' the most valuable substance in the universe yet one whose properties are scarcely understood. Then, upon returning to his ship, Jan learns he is in imminent danger: The radiance of a too-close star will soon char him into ash. Heeding the instructions from a colleague on Earth, Jan also discovers the most personal information imaginable on the ship's quantum computer: a form of searchable memories that chart all the pivotal decisions that led him to enlist in Ally Corp's space mission. Rushed for time but lacking the technical know-how to get his ship moving, Jan initiates a branching procedure on the computer that allows him to select an alternative life path. Using the rapidium, which is known to hasten organic growth, he births another self in the ship's medical wing, known as 'the womb.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Verge
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The Alters brings Kojima-esque weirdness to a tale of sci-fi survival
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.
