As far as The Alters is concerned – the new game from the This War of Mine team 11 bit Studios – every time we reach a major junction point in our lives, another version of us is theoretically created. Had you chosen to pursue a different subject at school, for example, it could have led to a different career. That’s maybe an obvious example but junctions can apparently happen because of many things – hobbies, friends, relationships. Where might we have ended up?
The Alters previewDeveloper/Publisher: 11 bit StudiosAvailability: Releases first half of 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X
This question is central to The Alters, because here, we can realise these different versions of ourselves and even manifest them by bringing them to life, where they’ll work alongside us. Hence the game’s name. And we will have to, because in The Alters, we’re in a race against time to survive.
In the game, we are Jan Dolski, a person working for some kind of sci-fi mining operation, and we’ve become stuck on a planet and are in danger of being fried by its nearby sun. If we don’t get out of the way before sunrise, we’ll die. But getting out of the way is not so simple, because we’ll also need to move our entire base. Fortunately for us, it’s wheel-shaped, so it can be rolled, but there are environmental challenges like lava-filled canyons to navigate along the way.
The solution, inevitably, involves research and development, and mining resources to build the things we need for it. But we cannot do all of these things alone. So it’s at this point we turn to the experimental and highly frowned upon world of cloning and our Tree of Life machine. And there, we will look back through our life – Jan’s life – for junctions.