Cloning game The Alters is very good. Cloning video game The Alters is something special. The Alters, a cloning game, is really good.
11 Bit’s strategy/survival game about the variations of one struggling astronaut is a 2025 must-play
There’s a moment in The Alters, the new sci-fi survival game about cloning, that I’ve mentioned to multiple friends to convey how wonderfully unusual it is.
The moment occurred relatively early in my playthrough of the PC/PlayStation/Xbox game, before things really went haywire on the hostile planet where my clones were stranded.
It was just far enough in to help me appreciate what development studio 11 Bit was up to.
I had expected that The Alters would simply be about the advantage of generating a second or third pair of hands, the better to send one of my selves off scavenging for resources and do some space-mining while another patched up yet another version of me up in a med bay. Any personality distinctions among the clones would be a side-show, I thought.
But, no, 11 Bit doesn’t just allow players of The Alters to clone the marooned astronaut Jan Dolski in order to multi-task the operations in and around a massive wheel-shaped base.
They ask players to scrub through a timeline of Jan Dolski’s life choices—leaving an abusive home, choosing a job after college, moving abroad (or not) with his wife, etc.—and then change one of those decisions and create a clone whose life branched that other way.
The result is multiple Jan Dolskis, each having taken a different life path.
We get Jan the doctor and Jan the scientist, Jan the therapist and Jan the miner. We get at least the implication that your profession is not a biological destiny. Nor is your personality, given the wide-ranging temperaments of the various Dolskis.
More than just helping hands, the added Jan Dolskis are people with whom to have long chats, to share differing perspectives on the events of their lives, to consider the constants and what varied. There’s a lot of that in the game.
As for that special moment, here’s what I texted to one friend:
In between all the mining for space rocks and base management, there’s some great sci-fi weirdness.
For example: You can make phone calls back to Earth and for some reason they have your estranged ex-wife call you to help you deal with being the sole survivor. But now the company that sent you on this doomed mission is worried that she’s freaking out, and they want you to calm her down. You don’t really get along with her anymore, though, so they’re like: What if you have one of your clones talk to her? And since each clone is made from a what-if deviation from your personal history, you can ask a clone who didn’t break up with her to talk to her. Which is what I did, though the conversation between clone and ex-wife hasn’t happened yet.
That’s what hooked me on this game. It’s what kept me questing and cloning Jan Dolski to the max for 23 hours, until the credits rolled.
I liked the space-mining parts. I liked exploring a dangerous planet. But what I liked most was exploring the nature of a half-dozen Jan Dolskis—and wondering about those I didn’t choose to create.
The highest compliment I can give The Alters is that it’s the rare sci-fi video game that is more Star Trek than Star Wars. So many games set in space use those trappings to swap bullets for laser blasts, to have giant walking tanks and maybe some spaceships shaped like capital letters. That’s fun, sure, but The Alters is more cerebral stuff. The game’s silly idea that a special ore can be used clone sheep or people is just a pretext to explore the conversations we might have with the versions of ourselves that did things differently. It’s also a set-up to at least dip, as the game does, into the questions of what it means to be a clone, to inhabit a newly grown body, to possess memories of events that, in this world, didn’t happen. It’s made for its players to think.
The Alters comes from a team at 11 Bit. They’re the studio behind This War Of Mine, 2014’s daringly bleak strategy game about regular people trying to survive in a city wracked by urban warfare. They’re also the makers of Frostpunk, a two-game series that mixes city-building with the tough choices a society must make when everyone— the young, the old, the infirm—have to survive in a world of sub-zero temperatures.
The Alters is a little less bleak than 11 Bit’s earlier games. Doom still looms on the horizon. The game is set in four successive areas, each more treacherous, each blocking the further movement of your base until you clear some obstacles, each on a timer until the days tick down and a fatal sunrise occurs. But there is constant hope and measurable progress across each simulated day/night cycle. Jan, Jan, Jan, Jan and, eventually, Jan and Jan, can slowly but surely improve their base, upgrade their space suits, build better machinery for breaking rocks, cook more nourishing food and even set up a room to play beer pong and watch short movies.
The game is also more fun to play than 11 Bit’s earlier work, which would be a knock on any other studio’s oeuvre, but not this team’s, where fun is seldom the point. The Alters, though, is a full-on third-person adventure much of the time, as the player controls the main Jan Dolski to run, jump, collect and even battle his way through the dangers found outside the base. You fill out a map, set up mining machinery, tether it back to base and skillfully use a grappling hook to reach new heights. The action offers momentary thrills and many gorgeous vistas.
A big chunk of The Alters is nevertheless played in menus, as the game challenges you to assign Alters to the most urgent tasks, while managing the production of resources and the urgent repairs needed during the occasional magnetic storm. Controls for the menus are mapped magnificently to a game controller and, in short order, the multi-tasking of climbing cliffs as Jan Dolski, then jumping into a job-assignment tab to maximize the work hours of the other Dolskis, becomes an easy reflex.
With the controls working smoothly, the game’s intertwining lives and survival goals become a captivating knot of problems. The clones have different, sometimes conflicting requests. Resources run scarce. Distant jaunts from the base to find supplies afflicts my Jan Dolski with radiation sickness. I clone myself a doctor to heal faster. here was at least one alter in my crew who I noticed was working himself to death. He actually died! I reloaded an old save and paired him with an in-game therapist. He lived.
There are multiple endings to The Alters. The one I got wasn’t quite happy. Given this is an 11 Bit game, I doubt any are. But it left me thinking, imagining about these unreal clones and things they’d do next. Their work—their game—was memorable. Maybe they didn’t technically exist, but they leave a lasting impression.
Item 2: In brief…
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The Alters is a game that's very tricky to explain to someone else who has no prior knowledge of what it is about. I recommended to someone last week on release and as soon as I said its by the devs who made Frostpunk, they said 'I'm in!!' and they are really enjoying it.
Yet since then two other conversations with friends who have never played a 11bit studios game ended with very little interest, even when I said just play it on GP and thank me later.
Its a very smart game, it does feel stressful at times but its extremely addictive and unique. Kudos to the devs at 11bit for creating a game that I hope will be remembered for a very long time.
Humble suggestion: could you kindly put a spoiler warning in front of stories like these? Sure, cloning is a core concept of the game, but what if someone would like to be surprised about the different life/career paths the main character can chose? Thanks much! :)