[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Act 2 of The Alters.]
Just when I got my Jans into the clear and avoided death by irradiating sunrise in The Alters’ very stressful first act, we were hit with yet another obstacle. And I’m not talking about the gravity distortions obstructing the Jans’ giant-wheel space base from advancing any further. Instead, they were staring down the barrel of doom via cloning-induced brain damage, and neither solution to the gray matter medical issue felt morally right — which made the quest all the more engaging.
In The Alters, most of your time is spent assigning Jan Dolski’s alters — clones he produces with alternate timeline consciousnesses — to tasks like base maintenance, resource mining, and making sure there’s food on the table to quell any brewing rebellions. Sometimes you get objectives that are simply to not let any alters die. Tension is high when you’re marooned on a lifeless planet with only six alternate versions of yourself for company.
But before Jan creates any of his alters, he clones a sheep to test the altering process. That sheep is Molly, the good girl who just chills in the Womb, the part of the base responsible for the biological aspect of the cloning procedure. Thankfully, you never have to worry about keeping her fed — there are enough things to keep track of as is — but you should give her lots of pets.
Molly dies unexpectedly at the beginning of Act 2, setting off a questline that won’t end well for Jan prime, and certainly won’t be easy on you, the player. There are plenty of choices to be made in The Alters, but none made me rack my brain quite like figuring out how to keep Jan’s alters alive, happy, and (most importantly) not mad at me.
Image: 11 Bit Studios via Polygon
After a sheep autopsy reveals every alter is in danger of the same fate that befell Molly, Jan seeks help from Maxwell, the shady figure who may or may not be capitalizing on Jan’s situation to further his own agenda (yeah, he’s definitely furthering his own agenda). Maxwell presents a solution that immediately made me feel icky to see through — healthy brain matter must be harvested to synthesize a cure, which means Jan would have to clone an alter but keep him sedated before his brain “activates,” and then kill him. That alter, dubbed Tabula Rasa, would be a sacrificial lamb, the “just one” option of the trolley problem.
Because Tabula Rasa is spat out of the Womb as a fully formed body, the ethical quandary is immediate. That dude looks like Jan, and all the other Jans. He is a Jan, just one who isn’t “activated” yet with a consciousness, a personality, or memories. There’s a big difference between Jan sacrificing a human who looks just like him rather than, say, a brain in a jar. That’s Jan lying asleep on the table. And that Jan is going to die.
Half your alters won’t be on board with this — the blank slate alter is still one of them, after all. They view Tabula Rasa as a brother, a member of this alternate timeline found family. Killing him would be like killing them.
The other solution, offered by Jan prime’s ex-wife Lena, involves creating and implanting computer chips into the alters’ heads to save them. However, doing this would alert the big bad capitalist corporation AllyCorp to their existence, which is a big no-no; if anyone finds out about Jan’s illegally cloned and ethically questionable alters, it’s likely lights out for them — that, or they’ll be put under the corporation’s control.
Image: 11 Bit Studios via Polygon
Both options made me feel quite queasy — there’s no binary good or bad, Paragon or Renegade choices here. Jan doesn’t get a morality meter to track if he’s being a decent or a shit human being. Instead, you and Jan have to sit with your choice, knowing not everyone will be happy with it — including even you! I too felt sacrificing Tabula Rasa would be like killing a part of this weird, argumentative family (who occasionally sings together). At the same time, exposing Jan’s alters to the corporation felt like guaranteed death or, perhaps worse, a lifetime of experiments and slave labor.
I wish I could have kicked the can down the road on the decision, but The Alters doesn’t work like that. Its sun is always rising, ready to burn you to ash, and the Jans’ brain problem ain’t going away on its own. Despite learning just how shady Maxwell is — turns out he wants to run his own experiments on the Jans; who coulda guessed? — I elected to go with his blank-slate solution, 3D printing a Jan just to kill him. It felt gross, like I was killing a part of the character I had spent about 15 hours embodying, yet I felt that self-death was better than whatever AllyCorp would do to the Jans. Sacrificing Tabula Rasa at least gives the Jans a fighting chance, or at least that’s how I rationalized the decision.
Regardless of which option you choose, things go south: The Jans are alive, but half the group won’t be happy, leading to a rebellion led by Jan Technician. Turns out our pierogi dinner could only bring us so close together, and killing Jan Tabula Rasa pushed us irreconcilably apart. Jan Technician and the unhappy Jans splinter off to try to survive on their own.
Image: 11 Bit Studios via Polygon
Jan prime and the Jans who remain aren’t out of the woods yet. We have to figure out how to survive Act 3, rescue the rebellious Jans, and ensure we all make it off this rock while trying to brainstorm a way to hide the Jans from the “rescue team” coming to save them. The Alters never relents, throwing at you one moral dilemma after another, and I’m really curious how — or if, really — I’ll be able to get my Jans home to Earth alive without any more blood on our hands.
