Tag: 11 Bit Studios

  • Review: The Alters (Xbox Series)

    Review: The Alters (Xbox Series)

    The Alters is a streamlined and mechanically satisfying survival-game that also asks the question: what would you do if literally faced with the branching possibilities of the choices you never made?

    The overarching plot slowly drifted into the back of my mind the longer I played, but The Alters has an intriguing premise that draws on several classic sci-fi tropes to turn a traditional survival game, with a strong focus on time management, into a thought-provoking journey filled with moments of frustration, elation, and unexpected warmth.

    Jan Dowski, a 35-year-old builder who has already accumulated a lifetime’s worth of regrets, emerges from a landing capsule on an alien world. He soon discovers his captain and crew are dead, and although their massive, wheel-like is base is intact, the engines are offline – a severe problem when the approaching sunrise in this triple star system will bathe the area in lethal radiation.

    After exploring for some basic resources and establishing a distorted communication link to the Ally Corporation funding the mission, Jan discovers the base’s quantum computer, the “Womb” cloning facility, and the rare element “Rapidium” found on the planet, offer him an unconventional means of survival: cloning himself to create a new crew – the titular “Alters” – by imprinting their minds with specialised knowledge and simulated life-paths based on different decisions made at key moments in his digitised memory timeline.

    Most of the narrative is centred on Jan and the fate of his Alters, but you’ll also piece together what happened to the mission through exploration.

    The more you think about it, the more dubious science and plot-holes you can spot in The Alters, but 11 Bit Studios gets around this by keeping the entire experience surreal. Is the Jan Dowski you are playing as really the original? What should you make of the fact every Alter’s life path converges on joining the Dolly Missions at 35? What is the fate of the Alters if they return to this timeline’s Earth? If interstellar travel and quantum computing are commonplace in this universe, why is the search for the time-manipulating Rapidium so important to humanity’s survival?

    I think what I like most about The Alters is how little those details mattered when I was engaged with the minute-to-minute gameplay and watching my growing Alter crew interact with one another.

    The Alters will remind you over and over again that it’s our decisions and life experience that shapes us, not genetics or ancestry.

    I’d describe The Alters as a hybrid of traditional third-person exploration game and a time-management-heavy survival game, just with a weird and wild crew management twist.

    Upon arriving in a new region, you explore on foot during so-called “daytime” hours – periods of low light and radiation levels – to discover and clear paths to resource deposits, build mining outposts and connect them with pylons, scan and destroy anomalies, find scattered mission gear for base upgrades, personal belongings to boost Alter morale, and later track down even weirder alien samples used for higher-tier research. It looks and feels suitably hands-on and immersive, though after establishing a resource chain, the bulk of your playtime is going to be spent interacting with base functions, engaging with Alters, or navigating assignment, production, and research menus.

    It’s tempting to maximise your exploration and mining time outdoors, but darkness, anomalies, and radiation burns can leave you sleeping in the infirmary with less productive time.

    The escalating resource and crafting requirements needed to survive and progress are streamlined compared to many of its peers, but time is always your enemy in The Alters. Efficient working hours are limited without enforcing mood-sapping crunch; the approaching sunrise shortens the time you can spend outside without racking up radiation burns; and a crew of alternate personalities are far more challenging to sustain than the generic staff you’d see in a game like XCOM. You’re not just building dormitories, labs, workshops, and radiation shields; you’ll also need to consider personal cabins, social facilities, contemplation rooms, and gyms.

    Each branch from Jan’s original timeline can result in wildly different personalities, with different anxieties, motivations, and triggers; all of which you’ll want to read up on in the simulated timeline before considering your responses in dialogue or when faced with suggestions. You will have to balance competing requests, deal with the fallout, and keep them all fed, physically healthy, mentally healthy, and entertained. Not treating your Alters as individuals is the quickest way to foster rebellion and jeopardise the mission when they ignore your orders or work inefficiently.

    There are plenty of actions, big and small, that can influence the mood of your Alters – but there are also obvious story beats that’ll trigger scenarios regardless.

    Regardless of the difficulties you pick for the game’s economy and action elements, you need empathise with your alternate Jans and occasionally boost their morale with gifts, social activities like beer pong and movies, and considering personal requests. It is impossible to clone every Alter variant and experience every potential outcome in a single playthrough, but good relationships teach Jan new life lessons that provide unique dialogue options, open new research paths, and alter the end-of-act outcomes.

    There is a lot to juggle as the clock marches on, but all the assists you could want are present. With enough Alters, the early exploration step gives way to a lot of menu-based gameplay as you quickly build and rearrange base modules, assign Alters to resource or production tasks, select research priorities, and set minimum stock levels or continuous production queues to maintain essentials like food, radiation filters, and repair kits for the sporadic magnetic storms that devastate base modules and hamper most outdoor activities.

    The chosen difficulty coupled with your skill at managing both time and Alters will determine if the mission plays out as scrappy and desperate attempt to survive on the edge, or as a well-oil machine that keeps on top of objectives and ahead of the sunrise with minimal trauma and injuries to the crew. That said, there are a few narrative beats that happen regardless of your actions.

    Building, rearranging, and navigating your expanding base is a breeze – just be aware the more modules you have, the more Alters you’ll need to maintain it, and the more fuel you’ll need for the onward journey.

    With the focus on crew interactions as much as it is on the survival mechanics, it helps that The Alters mid-tier price-point does not mean low production values. Like most survival games with base-building and menu-driven systems, The Alters gets a lot of playtime out of limited assets, but it feels polished and the compact environments – both the expanding base and increasingly vertical outdoor regions – look incredibly detailed and atmospheric. Character models also look good, with only a few stiff animations during emotive gestures or while climbing.

    More important is the writing, voice work, and delivery – both during moments where the Alter’s divergent personalities clash, and those in which they share cherished memories or establish new bonds. There are generic lines for common events and gameplay triggers, but I found it easy to empathise with Jan in all his forms. His Alters are exaggerated archetypes but they do an impressive job of leaving you frustrated with their vices, like pride, stubbornness, or self-pity, yet it also often left me elated during moments of unexpected compassion and warmth.

    All that said, I’m no psychologist or support worker with professional experience, so you might find the lack of subtlety in how some mental health issues are presented problematic.

    The Alters is not really an action-heavy game, but exploration on foot and targeting anomaly weak-points to destroy them feels good.

    Even as someone who prefers methodical games that move at my pace over those with time pressures, I enjoyed The Alters far more than I expected. Not so much for the survival gameplay – which is competent, streamlined, and challenging enough in its own right – but more for the thrill of discovering what new Alter I could create, discovering how their lives played out compared to the original Jan Dowski, and watching them bond or clash with one another under increasing pressure.

    I’m not sure if the writing and performances are quite good enough to compete with overproduced, “AAA”-style cinematic adventures with their ridiculous budgets, but The Alters actually got me thinking about whether you could ever stay sane if given the knowledge of the near infinite possibilities of all the decisions you’ve never made.

    Pros:

    • An intriguing setting with a weird and wild crew management twist
    • Streamlined but satisfying survival and time management mechanics
    • A gorgeous alien world to explore and solid voice acting
    • Recreating the high school band with your Alters

    Cons:

    • Possibly too much menu-driven gameplay for some
    • Early challenges can feel unforgiving if you pick the wrong Alter type or research path first

    Score: 9/10

    The Alters was reviewed on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC and PS5.

  • Review: Frostpunk 2 (PC)

    Review: Frostpunk 2 (PC)

    Frostpunk 2 is not exactly what I expected from a sequel, but it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the shift in gameplay focus. The first game was a gruelling city-builder with choice-driven narrative elements, in which you cautiously expanded your city outwards from the warmth of a central generator, trying to balance resource production, resource consumption, research goals, and survivor demands as temperatures plunged. The basics remain unchanged in Frostpunk 2, but the increased scale and longer timespans result in gameplay that can feel more hands-off, as you juggle supply lines and appease political factions through menus, toggles, and map screens – with less of a focus on traditional city-building optimisations.

    As a result, Frostpunk 2 can feel like a pure management game at times – the kind you play from a detached perspective with many basic functions automated. A game in which entertainment comes from analysing numbers, weighing up choices, trying to balance said numbers, watching the consequences play out, and then adapting or iterating upon your plans. It can feel a little underwhelming in the opening hour or two when you’re focussed exclusively on establishing your first generator city, but it starts to make sense once you begin exploring the Frostlands, creating new settlements and supply lines, and dealing with several factions that have divergent ideas about the future of humanity in the frigid post-apocalypse.

    This gameplay shift makes a lot of sense when you consider the substantial campaign mode that tackles the fate of the New London survivors from the first game – the “A New Home” scenario –and serves as a lengthy tutorial for the free-form Utopia mode. Thirty years have passed since the city survived the first whiteout and the Steward has recently died (or was possibly murdered by one of the emerging factions). After a brief prologue reveals the presence of other survivors in the Frostlands, a civilian council consisting of centrist New Londoners, traditionalist Stalwarts, and adaptable Frostlanders elects the player as the new Steward and tasks them with both re-establishing coal supply lines for the generator and discovering new fuel sources.

    The five-chapter campaign swiftly expands in scope to encompass vast swathes of the Frostland, with events playing out over hundreds of weeks, rather than days, and several locations from the first games scenarios returning – albeit now with canon outcomes. The impact of this expanded scope is that building out your generator city, or other large settlements, feels less hands-on. The core districts of your city – think housing, food production, or resource extraction – are built in a cluster of several titles and provide a supply of resources like the population you draw a workforce and heatstamps from, fuel for the generator, prefab materials for construction, or scouting teams to explore the Frostlands.

    A thoughtful, compact city, with carefully placed stockpiles and specialised district buildings, does offer benefits like improving productivity or reducing heat and workforce demands, but you can now deploy frost-breaking teams to clear a linear path to distant coal seams, oil deposits, fertile ground, or frozen lumber, and still build an extraction or farming district far from the generator. Certain sheltered areas also offer heat benefits, so you can even place housing districts further out. Once placed, you sit back and watch roads and heating pipes materialise, while the districts build up dynamically based on the terrain, shape, and any specialised buildings you’ve placed within them. It’s all wonderfully animated and your expansive city can look incredible, but it is a significant change from managing individual worker teams and slowly expanding into radial zones around a generator.

    On the upside, it pushes you to engage with the expanded mechanics faster, as your focus shifts from ensuring the survival of a single city and small population, to re-establishing a new society with all the challenges that entails. Cities or settlements become visually spectacular representations of tables and graphs; swelling population numbers are only of interest for the workforce and heatstamps they generate; and the sprawling Frostlands map evolves into an interconnected network of trails and skyways between resource-generating and resource-consuming markers. Coupled with the accelerated passage of time, Frostpunk 2 feels satisfying but less intimate, as you spend more time in menus adjusting the flow of goods between settlements or shifting your workforce between districts based on current demands.

    Naturally, the remnants of humanity quickly fall back into old habits, pursuing their favourite excuse to commit savagery when resource scarcity is no longer their primary concern: ideology. Frostpunk 2 has an expansive selection of potential laws that cover everything from heating and housing to immigration, crime, healthcare, and research opportunities – but enforcing a law is no longer your mandate alone, and it needs to pass a vote in the council. This system complicates everything and introduces a divergent path through the campaign. Each faction has an idea on what the future of humanity should look like, but they’re broadly split between adapting to life in the Frostlands or turning the generator cities and settlements into self-sustaining bastions against the cold.

    Several choices in the campaign force you to choose a direction, and striking a middle ground is difficult if you’re unwilling to forfeit technological advancements that can generate near-infinite resources. To get a vote passed in the council means assessing the mood of each faction, considering the percentage of the council they hold, and engaging in negotiations; a promise to vote for or against a motion that always comes with conditions attached. Those conditions are often passing a law or research goal that aligns with their ideology, with a bonus to trust gained if you fulfil your promise, and potential backlash if you don’t. Obviously, you can’t please everyone; some factions are more aligned with one another than others; and gaining fervour with any of them – for or against you – can generate instability.

    Dominant factions whose laws and traditions you permit might offer to support the city during a crisis, while others might sabotage it to undermine you. It could mean increased productivity in certain sectors, or protests that disrupt output. It’s a constant balancing act, but while finding some degree of balance is ideal, going all in with one faction will unlock more extreme laws and experimental technology to cement their rule. Each of the four difficulty levels adjusts how much trust you gain or lose based on resource scarcity and ideological conflicts, and if the council turns against you, your campaign run is over. It’s worth highlighting at this point there are some arbitrary limitations that feel designed to make life artificially difficult when faced with unexpected campaign choices and political turmoil, such as being unable to mandate a minimum stockpile level of a commodity, or to modify the fuel mix being consumed for the generator.

    There’s enough mechanical depth to talk for ages, but to bring this to some sort of conclusion, I’d argue Frostpunk 2 is a fascinating sequel that retains the basic foundations of the original but has a much grander scope. You could dive into the Utopia mode, pick a challenging starting settlement, set your own survival-based victory condition, and crank up the difficulty to better emulate the first game – but Frostpunk 2’s expansive campaign is the highlight. If the first game was about making tough decisions that involved trading a dozen lives for the survival of several hundred, Frostpunk 2 does this on an uncomfortably detached scale as populations swell into the thousands, spread across multiple settlements. It might not be the sequel everyone was expecting, but it feels like a terrifyingly accurate reflection of leadership in a time of crisis, in which your population is no longer a collective of individuals with needs but an ideologically fractious resource you need to maintain.

    Pros:

    • It’s easier to establish interconnected cities and settlements
    • Managing political factions is as stressful as managing resource scarcity
    • The choice-driven campaign changes up how later chapters play out
    • The Utopia mode offers highly customisable scenarios
    • Generator cities, settlements, and the Frostlands look and sound more beautiful than ever

    Cons:

    • Some arbitrary limitations can make life artificially difficult
    • It can feel like a pure management game at times navigating menus and maps
    • The district-based, city-building mechanics feel less significant

    Score: 8/10

    Frostpunk 2 was reviewed on PC using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is now also available on Xbox Series S|X and PS5.