When a game boasts such an intriguing narrative hook, I always wonder what came first - the story or the core gameplay loop. Did the team know they wanted to tell a specific tale and build gameplay systems around it, or vice versa? It’s a conundrum that surfaces in so many great games nowadays, and I felt it in my preview of upcoming survival titleThe Alters.
This new project from 11 Bit Studios focuses on Jan Dolksi, the sole survivor of a space expedition to a distant, hostile planet. You inhabit a large, wheel-shaped base that you can control and build within, but it needs a crew to operate properly. Who can you rely on if you’re alone? The answer is easy: yourself. Or rather, yourselves, as Dolski uses new technology and the Rapidum element found on the planet’s surface to create Alters of himself. While effectively clones, each individual Alter is different.
Using the quantum computer aboard your base, you can view Dolski’s timeline and recall key moments from his life, and then explore what sort of man he would have become if he had made different choices at various divergent points on his life path. Dolski never stood up to his abusive father, but if he had, he would have become someone else. Jan the technician, to be specific. So many parts of his life affect who he became, and by creating Alters you can view other versions of Dolski and use them to help survive the perilous situation you find yourself in. Yourselves in? I’m still getting used to it.
The Ship Of Jan Dolski
Game director Tomasz Kisielewicz tells me the starting point for The Alters was “the concept of creating different versions of the same person”. During the early prototyping stage, they didn’t have the ‘what if’ question behind the core idea figured out yet, instead focusing on giving agency to the player who could decide which features were changing and what sort of person each Alter would become.
For the initial pitch, Kisielewicz says he was also thinking of the Ship of Theseus concept. “If you switch every character trait of this person, is it still the same person after all?” However, it needed something more. “We felt theme-wise it was lacking something. It was lacking the soul.”
As the team worked on fleshing out the core idea, they eventually landed on the concept of creation being derived from a life decision, the butterfly effect of changing a pivotal moment to create a different output of who that person goes on to become. This shapes Dolski into a new version of himself that would fold into how the game would play out both mechanically and narratively.
And it’s not just a question of who this person is and how different or similar they are to their progenitor, it also opens up a whole can of clone worms. The inspiration from Dolly the Sheep is clear. So much so that the cloning program is even named after her. There are ethical questions here that will bubble to the surface as you play, and it’s up to the player to come up with their own answers.
I expected The Alters would be a run-of-the-mill normal survival game with an overarching clone motif tying it all together, but its emphasis on narrative impressed immediately.
Altering The Genre Norm
The Alters is a survival, base-building game with a sci-fi narrative, featuring challenging strategy and management elements. It can be hard to pin down a game when it’s pick ‘n’ mixing from so many different genres. But The Alters manages to blend its inspirations into a unique, perfectly balanced cocktail.
“We knew it was a problem when we started,” Kisielewicz tells me of the myriad inspirations. “There are some fundamental things for survival and fundamental things for narrative games. There’s a reason why they don’t mix together. But we said, ‘Okay, challenge accepted’.”
Kisielewicz says it took “a lot of iteration” to strike the right balance between survival and narrative ideas, explaining the first prototypes were “super fun to play” but then they had the challenge of applying the gameplay loop over the course of a “very classical narrative”.
“How do we approach the snowballing effect from survival games? How much do we want players to go back if they fail? How do we want to approach the save system? Do we want to restart the whole game, the whole act, every day? Do we want a quick save? [For] a lot of these decisions, we ended up with this system where you can decide on which day you want to start, and if you had a chance to load the game, we’re also giving you information of what’s the status of your mission and your base, so that you can figure out where you want to go back to.”
It was important that players couldn’t jump too far back into their playthrough, as Kisielewicz understands that repeating the same dialogue multiple times makes it far less enjoyable overall. “They are super when you see them for the first time. The second time you can catch something that you didn’t get for the first time. But third? Not really.” There’s also a highlight option for dialogue, so you can see which answers you chose before and either quickly progress as before, or stop and change decisions to help alleviate repetition.
Senior writer Katarzyna Tybinka adds, “It was pretty challenging. It was the idea not to compromise on the emergent side of the gameplay and the freedom of the player, not to compromise on that for the sake of the story.”
Tybinka wasn’t as experienced as the rest of the team, and tells me that as a result she didn’t realise how difficult it would be. “This story is so wonderful. I can write these wonderful things. And then suddenly, designers started coming up to me and said, yeah, but what if the player creates this alter in the second act, not in the first act? And then I was like, ‘Oh, my God. What have I gotten into?’ But then the challenge became very motivating. Suddenly you get the grasp of how to handle these things [and] how to prevent problems arising, and as we went along, it smoothed out pretty nicely.”
Tybinka also worked on Dying Light 2: Stay Human, but in Poland she is best known for her work on HBO’s The Border, known in Poland as Wataha (Polish for ‘wolf pack’).
Though there is one main classic storyline most will experience, Kisielewicz tells me there is a “big branching midpoint” that leads to multiple different endings, six in total, but he emphasises there are other variables. “For example, your ongoing quest of finding Rapidium, how much you bring back to Earth, also affects some details in those endings. There will be a part, like in This War of Mine and Frostpunk, an end block showing you different decisions you made along the way, maybe smaller ones, that didn’t influence Jan’s situation at the end, but showing you what you did and sort of summarized. The variety is big, even in small details.”
Tybinka says that the journey “feels different” depending on each playthrough, with Kisielewicz adding that even your choice of Alters gives a “very different flavour”.
“We Wanted Them To Feel Humane”
There are little one-liners that Alters might spout as you pass them by, which only appear if you’ve done certain events or chosen specific dialogue options. And amongst all that emergent storytelling and player choice, all those instances have to make sense.
You can’t have an emotional moment with multiple Alters, then a minute later have them all laughing about something. “It doesn’t work, so we really had to make sure that it’s not scripted. It’s still a really emergent system, but we can sort of channel it and say, these things won’t happen in this part,” Kisielewicz explains.
That’s where the emotion system plays a pivotal role. You can check which mood each Alter is feeling, and, for example, if your choices put them in a sad mood, there are emergent things that can happen as a consequence.
“The emotional management system binds the strategy with the narrative together nicely,” Tybinka says. The blend of the gameplay genres means there are intertwining aspects of systems, with emotional, economic, and narrative elements all working together.
You must keep Alters happy, which could mean spending some of your resources on a seemingly frivolous want, like a social room, rather than what you need to be priorisiting for your main mission. All these choices matter, going on to impact the narrative of each Alter and the overall plot of surviving and escaping the planet. One wrong move with an Alter might mean your whole mission goes kaput because they got so depressed they decided to end it all, and take you and all the other yous with them.
Though the emotion system works based on numbers underneath the hood of the game, Kisielewicz tells me they didn’t want to show players numbers by having something like ‘Sadness +15’ pop up. Instead, the size of the emotional clouds indicate how greatly they are feeling a specific emotion, and you can check their expressions on the side of your screen and from within the menu to see how they’re feeling too. Though it would have been easy to create a clear graph, Kisielewicz didn’t want it to be too literal or to treat the Alters as units or stats within the game, saying, “We wanted them to feel humane.”
Of course, I can’t help but ask Kisielewicz and Tybinka who their favourite Alters are. Initially, Tybinka says she can’t choose as she sees herself as the “mother of all Alters”, but then admits in a previous interview she chose the Scientist, but immediately regretted it and wished she had said the Technician as he’s “sort of a bad boy” and that “He’s the hard one to handle, to manage. And I feel that the relationship with him is the most powerful and satisfying one in the end.”
“Character-wise, I think scientist or worker,” Kisielewicz says. “Worker is a gift. But if you’re asking who would I like to hang out with, I think Refiner is my favorite. I think we could be pals.” However, he also agrees that he feels like a parent to all of them, so it’s impossible to pick a favourite child.
The Alters launches on July 06, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, so you’ll soon be able to choose your favourite without the dilemma of feeling like you’re a parent picking a child. Although really, as the original Jan Dolksi, you do create them all… does that make him more of a father to the Alters than a brother?
