The Alters Is A Very Strange Survival Sim And An Incredibly Difficult Acting Job

Spend Some Time With Your Better Selves

The Alters takes place on a lifeless planetoid which you have crashed onto alone, and you need to continually keep your base rolling along the surface to avoid sunrise; a very bad thing with no atmosphere to protect you from radiation.  The problem is twofold, one is that the base is pretty broken and needs to be repaired, the second is that you suck.  The protagonist seems to have made a lifetime’s worth of bad choices which have led them to be barely qualified for unskilled labour.  Since you are alone on the surface you can’t recruit skilled assistants to help you, but what you do have are two MacGuffins, namely a cloning device and a quantum computer that knows where you went wrong in life.

This leads to you making more of yourself, only ones that don’t completely suck but instead made a different decision in your past that lead to them becoming expert at a certain specialty.  Unfortunately they do still suck, in that they are still generally unhappy and aren’t totally onboard with this whole situation.  In order to get them to help you(s) survive, you will need to motivate them and keep them happy.  This is not just an interesting mechanic, it is also an exploration of the entire life of the protagonist and the choices made over that lifetime.

The game is voiced by Alex Jordan, Alex Jordan, Alex Jordan, Alex Jordan and … well you get the idea.  The same actor plays every single one of you in The Alters, that have feelings about their useless version which range from grudging empathy to searing hatred.  That is a difficult job to handle, but the reviews suggest he pulled it off.