Rolling across rugged alien wilds, your circular base in The Alters offers a twinkling haven from the whipping winds and nauseating radiation. At least, that’s how it feels for the first few hours. Gradually, as the in-game days stack up, my view of the vessel changes: protagonist Jan Dolski seems to be stuck on what is essentially a very expensive, very large hamster wheel, eking out an existence within modular rooms that look a lot like shipping containers. For the corporation funding this venture, Ally Corp (pah!), Jan and his crewmates are just like the resources they’re seeking to extract: commodities.
The hamster wheel stylings of your ship evoke the visual storytelling of filmmaker Bong Joon-ho: the speeding train in Snowpiercer, or the repetitive clone deaths of Mickey 17, each distilling class and the flow of capital into raw images. This should tell you something about how ambitious and frequently weird this sci-fi game is. In part, The Alters is a base-building survival experience of the kind that developer 11 Bit Studios received plaudits for with the Frostpunk series.
