The Alters

"Jan, this is Jan, nice to meet you Jan." The Alters is a rather unique take on the story-focused space survival, aiming for a branching narrative with meaningful player decisions. As such, this review can only reflect the playthrough I had and the story I experienced. Jan Dolski, our protagonist of the game, finds himself the sole survivors of a mission to a distant planet and soon learns his only hope of survival is to create Alters, a set of clones of himself that have different skills and memories and personalities. The core of the games narrative revolves around learning more about these Alters, dealing with their issues and keeping them on track. On top of the social puzzle of the characters, the game offers a fairly simple survival game with surface level exploration, resource gathering and time management. However, it is in these mechanics that the game fell quite flat for me. The areas to explore are acually quite small and restrictive and I found myself, upon entering a new area, having completed nearly all of the exploration on the first day. Obstacles faced are simple resource drains or hovering "anomalies" that serve only as minor annoyances. The survival also seems to be mostly smoke and mirrors, as the game constantly reminds the player of a looming deadline, but that deadline only seems to become concretely defined once the player has reached a set point in the story. It seems to me there was never any real time pressure or threat outside of these rare key moments that are carefully scripted. The game also suffers from many of the issues of modern PC gaming. Its engine chugs along and with my hardware revolving around an RTX 3080ti I had no options but to seriously compromise on the games intended visuals to get it to run acceptably. This led to numerous visual glitches that added to the frustration of janky character animations and constantly getting stuck on geometry while moving around on the planets surface. Finally, I have to touch on the stroy a bit more. The Alters focuses heavily on a magical element called Rapidium, which seems to be a kind of fix-it-all thing that, we are told, is critically important to all, but for gameplay it only gates the initial creation of the Alters and then some minor upgrades and achievements as far as I can tell. However, since the game takes place in such isolation from the rest of the world, it is really difficult to get behind the importance of Rapidium, or really care about the characters outside of the immediate events. Which Alters are created and what comes of them seems to be quite readily in the hands of the player, and so I wound up saving only one of mine at the end of the game, as various conflicts and events led me to lose all others. This would be kind of neat if not for the fact that I felt like I'd encountered a bug that gave me a flat "Game Over, You Died" screen seemingly out of nowhere towards the end. Combined with other bugs, like resources and UI elements getting stuck inappropriately, the game wound up feeling increasinly frustrating toward its end. The Alters is difficult to review, since it has so much variation to how its characters might play out that a different player with a different attitude might get a very different experience out of the game. But with its lackluster core mechanics, I feel I can't recommend it even with its interesting and unique character mechanics. The rest of the game is just not interesting enough and, at least in my case, the ending felt vague and flat. Playtime: 18+ hours (A single session of play until a good old-fashioned ragequit) Ratings (1-10) Visual: 7 Audio: 8 Story: 5 Gameplay: 5 Overall: 5

O jogo consegue ser uma mistura de Fallout Shelter com um Death Stranding de menor escala, com uma narrativa muito sólida, pautada em escolhas. O jogo possui 2 gameplays principais, a de gerenciamento de base, nada muito inacessível ou complexo e a de exploração de mapas, que consiste em coletar recursos para construção e sobrevivência para se poder avançar na trama. O jogo é dividido em atos, cada qual com seu cenário para exploração. Além disso, o jogo oferece até um razoável fator replay, uma vez que se pode mudar quase que completamente os Alters de sua run, sua ordem de criação e upgrades diferentes de base.

The Alters ogrywałem zarówno na premierę podstawki jaki i premierę dodatku Last Variable. Gra stanowi świeże podejście do tematu gier survival. Historia jest ciekawa z kolei mechanika alterów jest czymś co pierwszy raz mieliśmy okazję zobaczyć w gamingu. Dodatkowo oprawa muzyczna stanowi mocny atut. Nie obyło się jednak bez bolączek optymalizacyjnych. Na steamdecku dlc ogrywałem w okolicach 20-30 fps a im dalej w rozbudowie bazy i infrastruktury fps spadały do 8-10. Niemniej jednak byłem ciekaw robiona jak historia się zakończy. Fabuła podstawki bardziej do mnie trafiła aniżeli dodatku. Odkrywanie w dlc tajemnic planety było interesujące lecz przez otoczkę naukowego bełkotu z czasem dochodziło do skipowania dialogów. Samo zakończenie dodatku było zaskakujące, choć możliwe do przewidzenia jeżeli połączyłoby się kropki, które gra nam prezentuje z każdym nowym cyklem. The Alters daje 8/10 The Alters Last Variable daje 7,5/10

Отличная игра и отличное дополнение. Проходишь буквально на одном дыхании всю игру залпом

Alters - Hate them all! (dropped the game at 3rd act)

this game inspired me to clone myself in real life (do not tell the government)

Fantastic game with a very unique premise.