Three days is all I had until Jan, Jan, Jan, and Jan burned to a crisp.
I awoke and went to the elevator where Jan Miner passed by muttering something about the “fucked-up world we live it.” Agreed. I noticed an “Alter Rebellion” brewing on my tasks list. Great. I went down to the kitchen where Jan’s other Alters had gathered. Jan Technician started complaining — yet again — about wanting to play beer pong, yet I still had no idea how we were going to acquire enough fuel to get our wheel-shaped space base out of dodge.
In The Alters, I’m not chasing a sunrise to admire it, I’m running TF away from it lest it kill me.
The Alters, a new game from 11 Bit Studios, is ostensibly a survival and management sim where you, Jan Dolski, the sole survivor of a failing expedition, must find a way off an irradiated rock before its sun kills you. IRL, The Alters is a test of how you handle stress and how well you can manage decision-making under pressure.
The game is full of tasks, resources, and systems to manage that are stressful enough, not to mention the pressure of keeping the alternate versions of Jan happy. You’ll quickly find yourself inundated with tasks — like having to make sure Jan’s Alters don’t start a mutiny because they don’t like your shit cooking — as well as optional objectives to sort out.
Act 1 found Jan needing to build a bridge over a lava river so the base can keep moving away from the sun. I struggled to focus on that objective as I was quickly overwhelmed with needing to grow crops, meal prep, secure resources to build the bridge anchors, build those anchors, keep radiation filters in production, and a myriad of other tasks.
Because of all this, I completely overlooked the Qubit Chip questline. This was a crucial mistake, as building and implementing the Qubit Chip into the base’s quantum computer opened up research tasks for Jan Scientist, which was the only way I could expand my fuel tank. Without the expanded fuel tank, my base weighed so much that it required more fuel to get moving than it could store.
During my first attempt at hauling our asses across the bridge, Jan Scientist lost his research due to a malfunction in the lab. Because of course the lab malfunctioned. So he had to spend the next day repeating that research. By the time our fuel tank had expanded, my ticking clock left no time to go mine fuel, leading to death by sunrise.
I restarted an earlier save, but this time spoiled food made Jan Scientist sick, which paused his research (this is why impending death doesn’t allow for lunch breaks). Instead of stressfully trying to coordinate a solution, I accepted I was out of time and restarted yet another earlier save. This time I would get Jan Quartet moving and surviving.
Despite how much The Alters is making me go gray a month before I turn 30, I’m having a hard time stepping away from it. It’s the ultimate “one more run” game, but in a good way. Each in-game day quickly passes by, doubly so if the Jan you control is fast-forwarding through mining or workshop tasks. Those speedy days make me feel like there’s no reason not to play one more, especially if any Alter uprisings have been kiboshed. Repeat that process five or six times and suddenly I haven’t left my couch in two hours.
Once I figured out how to successfully get my base up and running away from the sun, I was able to finally build Jan Technician’s social room and beat him in beer pong. Should Jan prime have stayed up past midnight intoxicating himself the day before we rolled away from the sun? Maybe not, but it was worth the boost to Jan Technician’s morale and the only drawback was getting to sleep in (and is that really a drawback?).
Act 1 ended with the Jans — now five, as I cloned one more after installing the Qubit Chip — forming something of a boyband. They bounced around song lyric ideas and performed together like one big alternate timeline family. I don’t know what will happen to the alternate Jans when we make it back to Earth — if we make it back to Earth — but, now that I’ve wrangled control of the game’s systems (and maybe its Jans), I’m ready to resume that journey. Hopefully Acts 2 and 3 aren’t as stressful… but I doubt that.
