Warning: Your humanity is another resource to manage.

You’re trapped on an unknown planet, all by yourself, and a thought rings through your head: “what if I could do something different?” And that’s not the only thing ringing. A warning light chimes telling you there’s a problem with the mobile base you’re suddenly in charge of.

There’s your head again saying: “what if I took that other class in college? What would my life be now? Bare minimum, I bet it would enable me to fix that problem.”

The Alters is a game about being human, providing the runway to making those nascent “what if” thoughts a reality. Inside the mobile base is a quantum computer enabling you to clone yourself and create a new branch of your life. Instead of going to college, you went straight into the job field and ended up working on an oil rig. Or you became a doctor bringing you closer to people, or you became a scientist and abandoned every relationship in your life.

It’s a captivating exercise in empathy, and I found myself quite attached to The Alters’ quirks, the life branching system is well thought out and hooked me immediately. I’ve played a lot of games which boast about choice and are limited to something along the lines of Harvest or Rescue the Little Sisters in Bioshock. Yes, that’s a choice, but it’s a video game choice. It feels engineered and hollow, as it’s mostly a vehicle to the good or bad ending. The choices in The Alters feel purposeful; even little things feel impactful. This isn’t Mass Effect where the moral implications are flagged, The Alters trusts you to be responsible and thoughtful.

If I pick the wrong dialogue choice when speaking to one of my Alters, they may become upset and unable to work to their full potential. And the scary sun is bearing down on us, so I need the guy to meet that potential and not start a rebellion. Often, I found myself trying to do right by these guys despite my desire to focus on the task at hand. This cast of the same guy, played by the same voice actor (Alex Jordan), all come to life in such a satisfying and realistic way that I was gutted when a bug appeared in Act 2 that kept me from progressing for what seemed like an eternity. It was a matter of a few days, yet I found it agonizing.

The opening is so interesting and made for me, that I was replaying all of it over and over again in my head. It’s a collection of things I love: deep space missions gone wrong, sole survivor, weird alien landscapes. I was convinced there was another shoe that was bound to drop because everything is very suspicious for the majority of the first section. Is this going to be a time loop situation? Is Jan Dolski on this planet forever? Why are we shown so little up front? There’s a mysterious evil corporation and Jan’s crew all die on the way to this planet; we don’t know their names, we don’t see their faces. That has to be on purpose, right?

It’s probably budgetary reasons, which wasn’t a thing I considered for the majority of the story. I was convinced there was going to be some wild revelation. The two endings I’ve seen were a bit anti-climactic. Yes, there are reveals and twists, and my choices impacted things greatly, but everything seemed primed to set off some twist toward the backend, a twist that never came. 

As I came upon Act 3, I resigned myself to the idea that the big twist was not coming and tried to ground myself in what was happening. It’s quite the experience knowing that at any given moment I’m making a choice that will impact how this game plays out for me. It never quite goes the way I had envisioned, which is fine. Sometimes my expectations and my overactive imagination go awry and won’t allow me to stay present in the moment.

As I was putting together my thoughts on The Alters, I was struck by a sense of melancholy. I didn’t quite enjoy it all as I should have, and in a way that feels true to life. We never know we’re in the good old days until we’re outside of them. I was annoyed at the resource management or how these silly clones couldn’t decide to make themselves dinner on their own. Now, I’m a little sad I won’t be hanging out with these weirdos anymore. Like the Refiner who speaks like a stereotypical surfer bro, it sounds dumb when I say it, and yet it works. He comes alive and it’s far from weird. The writing and voice acting is great and I hope Alex Jordan becomes a megastar after this, because he should.

During my time away from The Alters, awaiting a patch to continue progressing, news of the developers’ use of LLMs and AI broke. While I understand these “tools” are being hailed as a way to speed up processes, it felt like a betrayal. Here you have this story that is very human and about being human and its creators are choosing to use these “tools” instead of hiring a person to work on the multi-language subtitles and using ChatGPT-generated placeholder text when Lorem Ipsum serves the same purpose.

It’s very disappointing. On one hand you’re telling me the human experience is beautiful and worthwhile, then this other wet, rough hand comes and slaps me. How dare you feel anything! You are nothing but fuel for the machine.

The generative AI slop has been patched out, but it’s still part of my experience. When I finally got back to it, the winds had changed. I no longer trusted my earlier instincts that this would lead to a grand finale. It felt as though I invested my heart into something that wasn’t trustworthy. After all, if you care about the human experience as much as you claim, why are you choosing not to hire a person to write the subtitles?

It started to feel false, all the heart and emotion that was packed into this game had become tainted and I wanted to take the quickest exit. You betrayed me and it made it very difficult to find anything redeeming. What once felt like it perfectly tickled the Getting Things Done (GTD) nerd in me, had become a never-ending slog to collect various minerals and junk to further a company’s agenda. The passing days felt like invisible walls, keeping me in.

So why did this sadness settle in once the credits rolled?

The human heart is resilient. It cannot be replaced. Humans poured themselves into crafting this experience, and it shows. So often we praise solitary geniuses and rarely do we really consider the mass of people it requires to create a game. The Alters is at times ugly, and repetitive, and corners were cut, but at the end of the day it’s undeniably human. We contain multitudes. Or at least Alex Jordan does.

Score: 7

A PS5 code was provided by the publisher for this review.