Published , by Lexi Luddy
Published , by Lexi Luddy
Choices. Every day is made up of millions of them. We make them consciously and unconsciously. But what if we made different choices? The boom in multiversal media over the last five years has revealed humanity's obsession with exploring how our lives would play out if we did things differently. The Alters, the next game from This War of Mine and Frostpunk developer 11 bit studios, is also interested in exploring these ideas. However, unlike universe-jumping tales like Everything Everywhere All At Once or Marvel’s recent output, The Alters wants to get a bit more personal. I played the opening three hours of the game and talked to the Creative Director, Tomasz Kisilewicz, at 11 bit’s inaugural Hands-On Event in Warsaw, Poland last week, and got to know Jan and his Alters a bit better.
The Alters focuses on Jan Dolski, your average sci-fi interplanetary mining engineer on a long-haul journey to discover rapidum deposits amongst the stars. The game picks up with the landing for his mission going awry and what starts off as a crew fit to run a big, rotating wheel mining facility is quickly reduced to just Jan, alone, by himself.
The first thing you’ll notice when you start playing The Alters is that it's a much more cinematic experience than 11 bit’s previous works. While Frostpunk and This War of Mine had deep lore, the real stories being told often came from the emergent gameplay as you tried (and often failed) to balance scarce resources. The Alters opens with a cinematic cutscene followed an hour or so later by a title card and intro montage not dissimilar to something you’d see before the latest HBO prestige series.
Don’t be fooled, though. For as cinematic as The Alter’s presentation may be, it is still heavily mechanics-driven, ostensibly being a survival game with a focus on resource and time management. Tomasz Kisilewicz, who was previously an art lead on some of This War of Mine’s DLC, explained, “We would like to have both…I think it's the most narrative-driven game we've done so far, with a very traditional structure of acts and characters and their arcs, etc., but underneath, there's this whole emergent cloud of stuff that can happen and it affects the main storyline.”
You’ll quickly discover that this planet isn’t very hospitable thanks to its orbiting star, which if it rises on you will burn poor Jan to a crisp unless you can travel across the planet to somewhere your employer can evacuate you from. After a few days of repairing Jan’s new mobile home, you’ll discover a minable rapidum deposit. This is where the game goes from The Martian to Moon (two cinematic influences the devs are happy to reference). Rapidum is a fictional and mysterious element that (the definitely not evil sounding) Ally Corp sent Jan and his team to find. As you are informed by a very helpful Ally Corp employee calling you over Space Skype, this mineral, paired with the facility’s Quantum Computer and a dash of Jan’s DNA, will allow you to create a clone of yourself.
Jan needs more bodies to get the rotating facility moving and, what’s more, he needs a technician to fix the facility’s electrics. Thankfully, for (as yet unrevealed) reasons when Jan plugs his DNA and rapidium into the Quantum Computer he can produce a clone of himself not distinguished from him by slight alterations in his DNA but by a single differing life choice. The result of this quantum science/magic is Technician Jan, another Jan exactly the same as your Jan, but who chose to stay with his mom and fend off his abusive father, rather than flee to college. It’s a lot to digest in just under an hour of gameplay.
Thankfully, in what I’ve seen of The Alters so far, this is all doled out at such a smooth pace and with writing engaging enough that it doesn’t become too overwhelming. The game even has a branching timeline that shows you the main life events and branching points for the Jans, which allows you to understand how these choices led to one Jan becoming a botanist, a doctor, or a scientist while also showing you the differing trials and tribulations that may have shaped them.
Kisilewicz told us that the roughly 50-person team explored this concept by asking each other what was one life decision they might change and how they thought it would affect their lives. Kisilewicz explained that this workshopping allowed the team to have very interesting and honest conversations about what sort of topics the game could tackle. He explained to us, “The main Jan, who feels his career didn’t go well when he sees the scientist version of himself, sees someone [that is] maybe better than him.” The Alters, as you might expect from an 11 bit game, doesn’t seem to be shying away from tough topics, with allusions to the first Jan you meet having a more severe drinking problem than the one hinted at with the player’s Jan.
In fact, the highlight of the demo came in the days after waking up Technician Jan as we tried to explain to him the heady sci-fi situation he’d just awoken in and he promptly (and justifiably) told us to “Fuck off” for birthing him into the path of a raging sun and demanded Jan stopped playing God. From the small section of the game I played, the inter-Jan writing already seems ripe for conflict and interesting situations. Slowly picking dialogue options that made Technician Jan not totally despise us, culminating in the two of us sharing pierogi and reminiscing about Jans’ life before they diverged was cathartic and touching.
It helps that The Alters, while dealing with serious subject matter, is undoubtedly 11 bit’s funniest game. Kisilewicz explains that “We have a topic that allows us to have more humor elements,” which shines through in the way that Technician Jan gave our Jan crap for his poor imitation of their mother’s pierogi. Kisilewicz tells us, “I think [the serious stuff is] more effective if we can breathe some air from time to time.”
However, a game full of Jan’s working together and at each other’s throats only works if Jan is a believable and likable character. That’s why 11 bit brought in veteran voice actor Alex Jordan for the role (roles?) of Jan. Jordan, who you might recognise as the voice of Mr Hands in Cyberpunk 2077, went through several rounds of auditions before landing the role but having now been cast Kisilewicz could hardly stop singing his praises. “Alex is out of this world… He is the game [in some ways],” said Kisilewicz, “[He’s] crucial for the execution of the game, and from the very first casting, Alex was showing this amazing passion for the project.”
All told, Kisilewicz estimates that Jordan has recorded roughly 60 sessions as different Jans, averaging out to somewhere around 600 hours in a booth. Thankfully all this time seemed worth it, as even with only a small bit of time with two of the Jans, I had already become quite attached to them and wanted to see them (him?) get off this rock. It sounded like a difficult task as Kisilewicz describes trying to find the balance between these Jans feeling like they were once the same person while also showing they have lived very different lives, with nothing more than Jordan’s voice and the differing character models.
It might seem like I haven’t discussed the mining and exploration loop of The Alters but having played three hours and having met only two Jans, I can’t help but admit that the exploration side of the gameplay loop took a bit of a backseat as I quickly became invested in my two bickering Jans. However, the resource management side of the experience seemed to be opening up where I left off as I could start assigning other Jans to deal with more tasks as I went out to mine materials. While it is too early to tell if this gameplay loop will stay engaging over the entire run time of The Alters, having played a fair chunk of Act 1, I find myself desperate to meet more versions of myself and see if those Jans are any better at making pierogi.