When a certain developer earns a reputation not just as a game creator, but as a think tank, the industry waits in anticipation. Polish company 11 bit studios has firmly established itself in this category thanks to its projects like This War of Mine and Frostpunk. These aren’t games that offer a sense of omnipotence; they force the player to exist in a space of moral uncertainty, total scarcity, and the unbearable burden of responsibility.
This is why the announcement of a new IP from this team instantly drew the attention of the gaming community. The veil of secrecy surrounding the project, known only by its codename, created a special kind of anticipation—one rooted not in a thirst for hardcore mechanics, but in one for meaning.
What facet of human existence will the studio explore this time? Will they return to an intimate, chamber drama or once again unfold an epic narrative of the collapse of civilization? Given their past work, there’s no doubt this game will rewrite the very concepts of “victory” and “defeat.” Furthermore, the studio’s engine and design philosophy have taken a step forward, promising visuals that will haunt the mind while remaining impeccably beautiful.
Let’s talk about a game that, for some reason, hasn’t been discussed much. Let’s talk about The Alters. I can understand why the focus has shifted to Frostpunk, but perhaps that should be corrected.
Have you ever delved into the abyss of the subjunctive, trying to imagine what kind of person you would have become if fate had taken a different turn at any point in time? Here we have a work of interactive art that tangles with ethical weights rarely brought up by game narratives.
You’re trapped in the graveyard of a gigantic orbital station. Thousands of light-years from Earth, in a pitch-black vacuum. Food and oxygen are dwindling. The base’s very structure groans and crumbles beneath your feet. But that’s not the true horror. The true horror is total loneliness. Until a certain point…
Meet Jan Dolski, our protagonist. In his past life, he was a simple civil engineer. In this one, he’s the sole survivor of the “Project Dolly” program and the loneliest man in the star system.
After the expedition crashed on the planet, Dolski survived the radiation surge only by a miracle (or by the cruel irony of the universe), and now he’s forced to count the cooling capsules containing his dead colleagues. The space “ark” is wrecked, the crew is gone, but Dolski himself is alive. And now, Earth gives an urgent order—run. The local sun is inexorably expanding, turning the planet into a giant frying pan.
Jan needs to move the heavy mobile base to the shady side before rescuers arrive. Otherwise, the star will simply fry him alive.
But moving the base isn’t like stepping on the gas. You need fuel. You need food. You need tools, spare parts, and a dozen personnel, all of which Dolski lacks. And Earth isn’t exactly in a rush to rescue our hero, because if they don’t have the very mineral for which the Expedition was created, then why undertake an expensive operation to save a single, completely useless person?
And then the planet, like the devil in Faustus, strikes a deal. The local mineral Rapidium, which the Expedition members were sent to find, and the power of a quantum computer allow Jan to traverse his own memories, as if through the rooms of an abandoned house, find the crossroads points of fate, and create Alters—quantum copies of himself who lived their lives differently. But don’t expect copy-paste clones in identical overalls. Here, identification is by profession: Jan the Mechanic, Jan the Doctor, Jan the Miner.
Each one has their own calluses, their own specialization, and a cold, assessing gaze. The difference between them isn’t just a different badge on their chest and a different hairstyle. These are people whose destinies diverged from yours at a single crossroads. They have different life experiences, different grievances, different dreams.
And here’s where the game takes a somersault: you are Dolski, desperately in need of help. But are you ready to share a cramped shelter with a man who knows all your weaknesses and every mistake? With a man who could have become you if you had turned right instead of left all those years ago? The Alters turns the question of “how to survive” into an existential drama about “how to live with yourself.” And the answers, it seems, will be very different.
The game doesn’t ask a single question; it immediately confronts you with a conglomerate of problems that you will have to solve very quickly in order to survive. Was the protagonist’s youth deprived of higher education? The device will extract the alter ego that walked the university corridors.
Did the hero endure the tyranny of an alcoholic father? It will create a personality capable of fighting back and protecting his mother. Biologically, they are indistinguishable. Their memories are identical right up until that fateful second. But after that, an existential chasm opens between them.
The base is visibly deteriorating. Maintaining its vital functions alone is unthinkable. Cloning is your only ticket to tomorrow. But the more copies multiply, the more rapidly survival devolves into a social horror. The confined space, compressed by isolation, seethes with conflict, treachery, and endless debates about the ethics of your own actions.
And here it is very useful to consider the questions posed by the game: Is the clone a person? Do memories of events that never happened have value? Is he human? And the main rhetorical question: did you have the right to create them in order to save your own skin?
Negotiating with ten strangers in hell is torture. But negotiating with ten versions of yourself, each imagining themselves to be the original, is a task bordering on the impossible. This is The Alters. A project the average person might mistakenly assume to be a typical drama from the depths of Steam. And, as is often the case online, many, having seen the game by its cover, missed its beauty and seriousness.
The game’s genre polyphony is so broad that I’m at a loss as to where to start. Firstly, it’s a base management game in the vein of XCOM or, God forbid, Fallout Shelter. You build modules to suit your taste: cabins, warehouses, galleys, recreation areas, gyms.
Secondly, you suit up and step onto the deadly surface. You explore, battle resource starvation, confront alien anomalies, and build infrastructure that delays your inevitable demise.
And thirdly, and most importantly, you’re doomed to constant communication with your own clones. You quell their conflicts, filter their whining and complaints through your fingers, and quell rebellions, lest, God forbid, you be ousted from the bridge with a snuffbox.
The Alters are a concentrated cocktail of social and conflict-generating madness, distilled in the retort of a cramped space station. As you progress through the game, you realize: the true threat isn’t radiation or magnetic storms. It’s here, within. Among a dozen copies of yourself. One clone goes on strike because you forbade him from calling your wife (yes, you now share a wife with ten of you).
The second foments a rebellion under the red banner. The third shocks everyone with his coming out. The fourth dies right at his workbench. The fifth follows suit. The sixth, too. And every Alter goes through an existential crisis after birth. He couldn’t accept the fact that all his memories were a computer-generated sequence, his decisions had no consequences, and his reality never existed.
This simmering interpersonal brew is the core mechanic of the game. The strict balance between all aspects creates incredible tension in the game and in your mind.
And the most intriguing thing is that each of you will have YOUR OWN story within the game, because the answers to every dialogue, every decision, every Alter directed somewhere changes the relationships between you all. My story stretched on for dozens of hours, filled with despair, hope, and rebellion. What will yours be like? Ask yourself, and maybe you’ll even decide to try writing your own.
The game’s mechanics are tightly woven into the story. Developing your base, discovering new blueprints, extracting resources and automating processes, improving the quality of life for your Alters and yourself—all of this presents you with an intriguing puzzle.
The decision to explore an automated drilling rig or a bedroom for your Alters can determine both the lives of your Alters, who are focused on extracting resources in a radioactive and hazardous environment, and their mood, as they’re tired of sleeping on the floor.
Your base is a giant wheel—its futuristic design allows it to move across the planet’s surface, traversing inhospitable terrain. It also serves as a Vedic solar symbol, representing the continuity of time. After all, in the game, we are constantly pursued by the Sun, which will burn everything and everyone in the next few days.
The base, as I mentioned above, can be developed and expanded just like in Fallout Shelter, the only difference being that the construction zone is located inside the wheel. First, we explored the new room, then built it, not forgetting its approaches and connections. Elevators and passageways are crucial to base planning.
Research will allow us to expand our arsenal of tools and rooms, and also help us solve our social problems. The base is constantly breaking down, radiation is slowly seeping in if the filters are broken, food is running out, the only entertainment is a multi-colored ceiling, due to the generator explosion… And that’s where we begin to explore new tools and rooms.
- Planet exploration: spacesuit upgrades, radiation protection, tools for combating anomalies.
- Economy: efficient resource extraction and processing.
- Base: increasing size, new modules, defense upgrades.
- Mission: research necessary for the plot.
A grappling hook, a drilling rig, filters on several levels, rest rooms and bedrooms, a medical center, and a recreation area—this is just the beginning of your exploration, which could give you a slim hope for survival. And while you can skip something in favor of more pressing research, you’ll definitely have to explore something. Problems, both resource-related and human-centered, will increase with each passing day.
Resource extraction will be the main challenge, as you’ll have very few, but the time to extract them is limited.
On my first foray, I discovered metal deposits and spent time mining them. Besides the approaching sun, we’re also pressed by time constraints. Days in the game are set in a specific timeframe, and any activity wastes precious time: resource extraction, equipment maintenance, cooking, etc. After evening, the radiation levels are horrific, making it dangerous to work outside, so it’s best to return to base before dark.
The game can also teach you to go to bed on time. Of course, you can sit at the machine until 4 AM, but then your character will miss reveille and wake up later in the day, spending less time on useful activities.
Having mined some metal, I returned to the base and spent it on building a workshop. This is an extremely important module, as it allows you to craft useful items: a grappling hook, batteries for your spacesuit, anomaly countermeasures, explosive packs for destroying rocks, and even a guitar. But at the moment, we only have one recipe: a scanner. It can be used for geological surveys. We stick special sticks into the ground, outlining an area to determine whether there are deep-seated deposits.
During my second foray, I discovered columns of blue vapor rising from the ground—organic matter. In terms of its number of uses, it works like men’s shampoo: you can use it to fill up a gas tank or cook porridge. After scanning the ground and finding the point of maximum concentration, I crafted a drill and installed it on the deposit. The drill allows for theoretically infinite resource extraction. Automated delivery also requires supports (long hoses) to pump resources to the base.
Having found Rapidium—a desperately needed resource to save the Earth—the company will offer us the opportunity to save the Earth (and ourselves, too) by creating an Alter—our Alternative Copy. Alters are created using a Quantum Computer, which stores all of our memories—as the original.
The computer finds points where changing a single event creates a new timeline, and then extracts a person who lived a life “inside” this simulation, but possessing all the talents they “supposedly” possessed in their original life. (Yes… Even here, the player begins to question whether this is a real person, and how will I treat them?)
And so, to create at least one Alter, we are first introduced to the life of our Jan Dolski. We see his entire life, framed in short stories. His sick mother, his alcoholic father who beat him, his running away, the Institute where he partied and drank like crazy, his meeting with the girl he would later spend his life with, his problems, their breakup, his joyless life, and his decision to join the Dolly Company to fly off on an important expedition.
Then the computer offers us several paths, choosing one of which will give us the “right” Alter, with the required abilities. A mechanic Alter, who didn’t run away from home but became a good mechanic capable of maintaining and repairing the base; a scientist Alter, who developed numerous technologies and can assist in research on the ship; an oil producer Alter, capable of increasing resource production… With each new Alter, the computer will present us with more and more paths. And EACH of them has their own Life Path, different from ours, EACH of them has their own branching points. Even just becoming familiar with these paths is a wonderful experience, capable of enriching your life, and the realization that these branches increase with each Alter and can reach infinity is astounding.
Now imagine. You wake up in an unfamiliar place, and before you is someone who looks exactly like you, and introduces himself using your name. After all, each of the Alters will give you their opinion about their creation and your selfishness; one will even claim that you had no right to leave all these memories of a shitty life in their head!
The mood mechanics in the game are also highly significant; every conversation, every game of Beer Pong, every gift, and every solved problem will influence the Alters. You left the Alters without beds – and they could start a riot in a week, you forgot that the Alter – Oilman asked for pain medication, and he will first take out his anger on you, and then die during work, you didn’t watch the Film with all the Alters during rest – and they left the base.
Every conversation between the Jans will be a minefield. You think this answer will satisfy both of you, but no, Jan Dolski the Miner thinks quite differently. Due to his life’s path, he will become embittered by your answer. Dejection, rebellion, indignation—you will often see your Alters experiencing these feelings, and you will need to lift their spirits in any way possible. Each Alter has several key indicators:
- Mood (affects their attitude toward you).
- Motivation (affects their effectiveness and work duration).
- Rebellion (affects loyalty and obedience to orders).
- Sense of security (general psycho-emotional state).
Give someone a gift—for example, a multi-tool that was important to them in their life. Play beer pong with someone, deliberately losing, but the main thing is to do it discreetly. After all, they might realize you’re giving in and be upset by such disrespect.
Alters may ask you to take a day off or fulfill another request—this will help you cheer them up and help them bear the weight of their lives. You can find both these “gifts” and rare films inside the dropped containers.
Ah yes, movies. After building a recreation room where you can unwind and relax in the intimate company of yourself in all your alternate forms, you can watch the films you’ve found. Each film is a miniature work of art, telling a story about a specific issue in a comic, tragic, or other form. A short video featuring the actors was filmed for each film, and after watching it, both new questions and new sensations arise. After all, films about loneliness, selfishness, and xenophobia can truly pose new questions about your life.
Remember, each Alter is a distinct individual. Living at the base, they react to events differently, do different things, and even do push-ups in the gym differently. To understand, EVERY Alter is voiced by the same person, but when two, three, or four Alters are talking, close your eyes and ask yourself: are you hearing one person, or the real-life conversation of many? It was a revelation to me that the voice acting was actually done by one person, but the professionalism and virtuosity with which he voiced each of the Alters astounded me.
And yes, as you progress through the game, you’ll constantly be presented with new challenges, new developmental options. The death of the Alters, their “disease,” the Company that hired us, Rapidium…
My story was extremely intense and nerve-wracking: the Alters’ rebellion, their escape, the death of the Alters and Dolly the Sheep, the very first one we created with Rapidium… And also Tabula Rasa. A clone without memories, who turned out to be not so “empty” after all. Completing quests from each Alter will also allow you to gain certain “lessons” that can unlock new dialogue options. This can radically change your story, or ruin it.
The game’s ending will be unique to everyone, as there are many possible decisions. Whether you strive to return to Earth alone, or with all your Alters, to bring back Rapidium to save the Earth, whether you submit to the greedy and selfish Company, or rebel and blow everything to hell… the decision is yours.
Literally, yours. I won’t describe much of the game’s story, as it would take an extremely long time: the brain chips, the Alters’ experiments, many aspects of corporate ethics, and so on—I’ll skip all of it—but know that the game will captivate you for many hours.
My ending was quite pleasant, albeit difficult to achieve, very nerve-wracking, and long-awaited. Dozens of hours at the same base with my Alters, their escape, and the deaths of some.
The rescue ship landed. An armed squad began its inspection. When the scanner detected “organic matter” in one of the arks, the moment of utmost tension arrived. Using the lessons learned from the Alters (cunning from the Guard, tenacity from the Mechanic), I conducted a verbal duel, attributing the signal to “space roaches.” It worked.
Once on the ship, I put the plan into action: I tranquilized the crew, and the Ex-Wife rerouted the course. We landed at the designated location. The Alters were secretly removed.
Jan Dolski became a hero, having saved Earth with Rapidium. The Corporation, fearing exposure of its experiments, chose to hush up the scandal. The trial accepted the official version: prolonged isolation caused the cosmonaut to suffer a mental breakdown, during which he invented “doubles.” No Alters existed. But in his new home, Jan receives an envelope in the mail. It contains photographs of beautiful Earth landscapes. On the back of each is a signature: “To Jan – from Jan.”
They are saved. They are free. They are alive. The game ends not with a resounding victory, but with a quiet, multi-layered feeling. It’s the sadness of inevitable losses, the relief of salvation, the bitter aftertaste of the “official” lie, and the warm hope of looking at these photographs.
The Alters makes you think about the value of every life, even the “fake” ones, the burden of choice, and the fact that within each of us there are many unrealized selves. It’s a powerful, emotional, and philosophical statement, packaged within complex, multi-layered gameplay.
