11 bit studios is one of the more interesting developer-publisher outfits in the video game business right now. As a developer, the studio has popular titlesFrostpunkandThis War of Mineunder its belt, but in the last year alone it’s published games like The Thaumaturge,Indika, and The Invincible, all of which are bizarre and beautiful in their own ways.
I went to Warsaw this month to check out two of its upcoming games, one of which was The Alters. I’ve never been much of a survival fan, but The Alters grabbed my attention immediately with its compelling blend of intriguing sci-fi storytelling and adventure, base-building, and survival elements.
In The Alters, you are Jan Dolski. You were part of a mission to collect a material called Rapidium, but unexplainably, all of your crew except you died upon touching down on a strange new planet. You scramble to your base for safety, and when you later venture out onto the planet’s surface, it doesn’t take long for you to stumble across the mysterious substance. Lucas, a spokesperson for the shadowy corporation you work for, pushes you to use it to make a sort of clone of yourself, and throughout the demo, he guides you towards surviving on the planet long enough to find a way home.
By using a bizarre technology back at base, you are able to see every major decision you’ve ever made in your life, and create a version of yourself that made a different choice at a specific point in time. A version of you might be a technician, more efficient at maintaining the base, because he stayed home with his mother instead of moving away for college. Another version might be a scientist, because he stayed in academia and did a PhD. Each Alter has a different skill set and can help Jan in different ways, but each also has their own personality and desires. Pick a choice to change, and watch your Alter grow in a tank before your very eyes.
This is but the first of The Alters' two very distinct halves. You take shelter in this base, and for it to continue keeping you safe, you must maintain and upgrade it regularly. It’s pretty typical base-building fare – you may reorganise the layout at will, and each room has a different purpose and requires different materials. Most tasks require someone to stand there and carry the work out manually, and Jan has a finite amount of energy every day. You simply don’t have the time or the skills to do it all on your own.
That’s where your Alters come in, but don’t be fooled, they’re not just manpower you can order around. A major part of the game lies in trying to get these Alters to empathise and cooperate with you. The first Alter I made, a mechanic, was understandably upset with me, since I’d basically forced him into existence on a hostile planet so he could do free labour for me. If he didn’t, we’d both die. I’d be pissed too, honestly. I managed to win him over by commiserating over old memories and making him pierogies like our mother used to, and he became less hostile and more willing to help me.
It’s not just me they’ll have beef with, though – because each Alter is unique, they inevitably end up clashing with each other. I’m told that later in the game, they start having ideological disputes, and can even split into separate camps, forcing you to defuse the tension. One of the fail states is that they, essentially, unionise and mutiny against you. It’s an excellent touch that highlights the humanity of your Alters and adds another layer of difficulty to the game.
The other half of the game takes place outside, on the surface of this dangerous planet. to keep your base running, you must collect resources to create new technologies, radiation shields, and supplies. On the planet’s surface, the game suddenly feels very much like Death Stranding. You can manually mine small deposits for materials, or use tools to identify underground deposits and build machinery to mine those instead.
You can assign Alters to work shifts at these outposts or mine the material yourself.
These small outposts must be connected to your base with pylons that you place at intervals – when they are properly connected, the outposts conveniently also become fast travel points. The opening hours have small maps that force relatively linear progression, but I’ve been told that the game opens up into larger, non-linear environments that you must build new equipment to traverse. Before my demo ended, I’d blown up a row of rocks to open up access to a new area, as well as built climbing equipment so I could access higher places within the level.
I’m not a Death Stranding fan, so I expected this sort of thing to bore me, but the environments are so otherworldly that I couldn’t help but look forward to leaving my base. This is where The Alters’ influences become apparent, as I was immediately reminded of Interstellar and Annihilation. The planet looks almost like ours, but has just enough strangeness to feel frightening. The roiling ocean by the beach Jan drops on at the beginning of the game looks like an oil slick, dark and pearlescent. The cliffs are made of narrow hexagonal rock columns that make every natural formation look bizarre. The Rapidium deposits you come across emanate light in rising columns, looking like raindrops of light going backwards into the sky.
Seriously, It’s Beautiful
Also like Interstellar, there is a regular, lethal wave that forces Jan to return to base. Instead of a tsunami wave, though, it’s radiation, and Jan has only a minute warning to return home before it kills him. you may’t spend full days collecting resources, and therefore have to adjust how much sleep Jan gets and when he wakes to maximise your productivity off-base and in it. If Jan works late into the night, you can make him either sleep less and have less energy the next day, or wake up later and have less time to collect resources before the wave comes. Either way, you can have him work on things in the base after the wave comes. This didn’t add much difficulty for me, but it might later on when there are more resources to balance.
Just like in Stardew Valley, if you work Jan past his limits, he’ll faint and wake up the next day with much less energy.
I’m not fully convinced by The Alters yet. Some of the writing is a little lacklustre, and the facial animations of the characters aren’t very convincing yet. I can’t help but feel that the emotional turmoil of these Alters would be more meaningful if I saw it on their faces instead of in bubbles over their heads that indicate how their feelings are changing. But conceptually, there’s a lot of promise here, with a compelling sense of mystery at the game’s core and strong mechanics that left me sorry to put it down.
