The Alters

我是一群该死的刁民

First time in a long time, i feel like right where i'm suppose to be.

Great story, excellent vibe and decent gameplay. May be a little bit too linear for some people, as the game forces decisions/reactions to keep the story flowing.

И так, я начал играть в The Alters в интересный для себя период. И это был не побоюсь этого слова ЛУЧШИЙ опыт в моей жизни, именно Альтерс помогла мне прорваться и переосмыслить многое. Альтеры в игре будучи пикселями, действительно заставляют тебя привязаться к ним, каждая история уникальна и интересна по своему. Я мог очень долго сидеть и втыкать в выборы в диалогах прокручивая все вероятные исходы, с головой погрузившись в игру ты получаешь невероятные ощущения. Игра дает тебе быть собой, твои выборы действительно влияют на многое и именно это лучшая часть в игре.

"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

这一切都值得吗？快给我出一个dlc好结局啊

Boring linear game. Very bad idea for survival games to be linear

One of a kind game that I played on a whim. In no way was I expecting to get so drawn into this story and character rich survival base builder.