13 hours ago
- 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.'
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