The Alters Review

About five hours into The Alters I had a thought. “I wish I could zipline from Pylon to Pylon,” I thought. The concept felt familiar, but I couldn’t work out why. Then I did the podcast (Episode 760) and Luke pointed out a strong resemblance. Death Stranding. In Death Stranding, you walk around a barren planet making pylons and then you zipline between them.

Five hours into The Alters, I was wishing it was more like Death Stranding.

I did not enjoy Death Stranding. I think it is a bad game. You should definitely read why via that link. I, like Hideo Kojima, love the smell of my own farts and I think that review is top tier stuff. So it was confronting to me to think that I wanted a game to be more like Death Stranding.

But Death Stranding came out six years ago. I know the sequel comes out tomorrow, but it’s been a while for me. Time erodes nuance, and the last half decade plus has seen my complex opinion on Death Stranding whittled down to a single solitary point: I think it is a bad game.

But that isn’t true, not strictly. I think it has far more bad about it than good, but there were some things I liked. I liked the environmental aesthetic when it wasn’t making the game harder, I liked the world-building when it wasn’t dumb or blatant cross-promotion bullshit, I liked the themes of isolation and loneliness when I could find them beneath the supertext and exposition.

And then along comes The Alters, a game with a gorgeous environmental aesthetic, exploring themes of loneliness in a manner that is a little expository but still has nuance, with world-building that is mostly smart.

I mean, of course I’m gonna like it. I’ve played a worse version of it before. The only thing that was missing was the ziplines. If I ate a disgusting mashed potato taco that had an incredible garlic sauce crema on it*, I wouldn’t be out of line if I found a roast potato taco and wistfully imagined it might be improved by that delightful garlic sauce.

But The Alters is more than just an answer to the question “What if Death Stranding was good**?” It’s also—and I mean this in the nicest way— an answer to the question “What if a survival game was bad?”

I’ve played a lot of survival games. I love them. You know the types. Resource acquisition simulators, not-so-idle clickers, games where some numbers go up, some go down, and your job is to make the right ones go up enough to find new numbers to increase. The Forest, Subnautica, games where your primary objective is ‘survive’ but your greatest enemy is not a monster, but the limits of your capacity for risk management.

And The Alters is certainly one of these. You are Jan Dolski, the sole survivor of a doomed mission to an alien planet. All alone, you need to acquire enough resources to live. So you mine metals, and organics, and minerals—gone are the specifics seen in other games, but the idea is still there. Get enough Organics and you can make food. Mine enough metals and you can build Repair Kits. Both of these are useful if you don’t want to die. But Organics and Metals are needed for Radiation Filters as well, so you need more. Mine more metals to build Resource extraction tools, but those require power. That means you need to build Pylons.

And it does all of this as a clock ticks in the background. Well, two clocks. There is the standard “day” clock on a 24 hour cycle, which restricts how much time you can spend exploring the world while avoiding radiation poisoning. And then there is “sunrise”, which heralds the arrival of your new home’s Sun. When that happens, your base will be destroyed and you will die.

The Alters is quite good at breadcrumbing you into the basic elements of survival via a combination of these factors. There is a very natural progression about it. And when you find Rapidium—the element your doomed space mission was searching for in the first place, it feels very natural to take the game’s next leap in logic.

That is, to use the Quantum Computer aboard your base to clone a different version of yourself. To, you know, help out. To make the Organics into Food and Repair Kits and whatever.

You search through your memories, you find a version of Jan who is good at something in particular—let’s say making food—you wait 8 hours and bingo bango a new Jan appears.

Of course, this Jan isn’t quite like Jan Prime. He’s different. He made different choices along the way, and grew into a different person. One who likes making food, but also one who explored his sexuality further. Or who never broke up with Jan Prime’s ex-wife. The Scientist is a Jan who poured his entire life into scientific discovery and over time, that became the only thing that mattered to him. As a result, he’s a bit of a dickhead.

Over time, you realise all of the Alternate Jans are kind of dickheads. All except the Refiner, he’s cool.

When I first made contact with this portion of the game, I thought it had evolved away from being a survival game into a colony management one, but it’s not. Not really. You do have to manage the Jans, their moods and behaviours, but on the default difficulty it’s so simple to do that it only ever raises its head when it’s story relevant.

Which means it remains a survival game—just a story-focused survival game. And the story is great. It takes a while to get going—almost too long, to be honest—but when it’s going, it’s very compelling. I won’t spoil it here***, but it deals with a lot of the logical questions you might have in a game where you clone yourself six times. A lot, but not all, as at no point do the Jans bang one another, so the question “can someone go fuck themselves” remains a hypothetical.

And honestly, the survival takes a backseat to the storytelling in The Alters. The number balancing aspect is primarily used to ratchet up the tension on the player, but the way it does this is by limiting your storage, meaning you will spend a great deal of time doing that most tedious activity in any survival game—inventory management.

“But Joab,” you ask, interrupting me just before I could answer your question anyway. “If you have loads of resources, can’t you just make more storage?”

Yes, yes you can, but that doesn’t quite solve your problem. Your base is, for I have to assume are sci-fi reasons, a giant wheel. And you can cram quite a lot of storage into that wheel, which briefly minimises your need to manage inventory. But the wheel requires fuel to move, and it has a limited capacity of fuel storage for some reason—a limit you cannot expand with storage. Exceed your wheel’s fuel storage capacity and you cannot move. If you cannot move, the sun will burn you and your clones and your giant sci-fi wheel away to ashes.

In fact, building a shitload of extra storage exacerbates your problem significantly, because as sunrise looms you will realise not only do you need to delete resources to squeeze under the fuel cap—every time you delete an extra storage it gets recycled into resources, which you also need to delete. You can’t just tell the game to delete the extra storage and its resources altogether, so when trying to manage your inventory after pushing far past the fuel cap, you’ll spend far more time switching between menus than you saved by just keeping a sensible sized wheel in the first place.

As a Satisfactory fiend it’s quite frustrating—you get the tools (sentient clones of yourself who have no choice but to do your bidding for zero pay but let’s not get into that) to automate a great deal of your survival, but if you ever choose to really go ham and try to maximise your resource gain, instead of rewards you get punishment.

So if I were to rank it against other survival games, I’d probably place it pretty low. Definitely above Death Stranding—it’s not like you’re farming likes here or something—but there are many others that do it better.

But The Alters is just using the survival game genre as a backdrop for its storytelling. It’s not really trying to compete with the The Forests or Subnauticas in that respect. Instead, it’s using limited resources and a ticking clock to force you to make some fairly gnarly decisions. To interact with your clones, to manage their feelings, and to self-reflect—both as Jan and as a person yourself.

I think it succeeds, but only barely. It’s too rigid in its choices, too obvious in its linearity, for the emotional weight to really crash down on me. The story you follow in The Alters branches and forks, but it winds up playing out largely the same way no matter what.

And in a way, that is one of the points The Alters is trying to make, but that doesn’t make it better. If I come to the realisation that I haven’t really had any major agency in where the story has gone despite my choices, I don’t think it’s particularly clever to offer up a fatalistic “but do you really have any agency at all?”

That said I loved the characters in The Alters, which feels weird to say when they’re all just versions of the one person. And when they’re all kind-of dickheads. But they conflict in really interesting ways, and some of them have fascinating quandaries about the situation they’re in. And when you hang out with them, The Alters has included some very cool meta-fictional movie elements that I found quite amusing.

So I think the storytelling is worth playing The Alters for. And I think The Alters is worth playing, if you’re up for a game that is more interested in using the Survival game genre as a gimmick than for its own merits. I do think it’s possible to make a great survival game that has a great story—both The Forest and Subnautica did it, after all. But I’m willing to admit that it might be harder than it looks, based on Sons of the Forest and Subnautica Below Zero, so I’m happy to cut The Alters a bit of slack in that regard.

I’d say play The Alters. I think you should. It’s on Game Pass (at time of writing), so you can try it out if you like. And I think you’ll probably get roped in by its gorgeous aesthetic, excellent theming and absent “ironic” product placement. By its compelling but flawed survival gameplay loop, and its compelling and flawed character(s).

It’s weird they don’t really dig into the slavery thing though. I guess people don’t talk about how Pokemon ignores it either.

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*I did eat a disgusting mashed potato taco once by the way, in LA of all places, and it did have an incredible garlic sauce that to this day I haven’t been able to replicate.

**Debated whether I should write “What if Death Stranding was good on its own merits and not propped up by a bunch of bamboozled players who, when presented with absolute nonsense, instead opted to invent and ascribe meaning out of whatever little they could grasp to avoid contemplating the idea that maybe Hideo Kojima isn’t a great writer, all the while ignoring that he hasn’t ever been a great writer, just an interesting one whose games had great systems?” but I thought it was a little wordy.

***I contemplated doing a spoiler-riffic write-up of this review but I decided against it.