Tag: Gaming

  • 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.

  • Retrospective: Citizen Sleeper (2023) is all about building a new life, one cycle at a time

    Retrospective: Citizen Sleeper (2023) is all about building a new life, one cycle at a time

    With so many games and so little time, Citizen Sleeper was yet another indie release that caught my eye before being swamped by tsunami of gaming news promoting the next best thing. Thankfully, returning to it three years late is easy, with the minimalist but stylish visuals, slick interface, and evocative soundtrack effectively timeless. And I’m glad I did return, as there is something comfortingly familiar yet fresh about the hybrid structure that blends a choice-driven visual novel with a dice-driven, tabletop-style RPG. It’s also uplifting as hell, despite the often-bleak setting and scenarios you’ll face, and had me wondering if my life was also just a string of choices and more RNG than I care for?

    It’s worth noting up front that you need to be comfortable with a lot of reading if you’re going to gel with Citizen Sleeper. There is no voice work and often paragraph after paragraph of text to work through. From the opening sequence that introduces you to your synthetic “Sleeper” body with a transferred consciousness, through to the heartfelt culmination of relationship-building quest-lines, and the handful of potential endings, Citizen Sleeper conveys everything through excellent writing, lightly animated character portraits, and the accompanying soundtrack. I found it an impressively thought-provoking experience that generated stronger emotions than the glut of cinematic “AAA” games I’ve played over the last decade – many of which featured professional voice work and lavish motion capture.

    There’s a diverse cast to meet and while many are familiar stereotypes, there is always a satisfying number of resolutions based on your interactions.

    It’s possible you will recognise many of the sci-fi tropes the world of Citizen Sleeper is built upon, but the setting remains a strong hook throughout as the game doesn’t rush to explain everything up front. Instead, each character has a link to major players in the Citizen Sleeper universe, and through interacting with them you’ll come to understand the past and present of the world you now inhabit. What’s clear from the get-go is that “The Eye”, a decaying ring station in the Helion system, on the edge of the Core region, is home to human, augmented, and synthetic workers – some bound by company contracts or gang debts – all trying to get by providing essential services or engaging in dangerous space-faring work, like terraforming, resource extraction, and salvaging.

    A corporate collapse a generation before resulted in the emergence of several factions: a workers union that evolved into a corporation with a structure it once despised; a gang straddling the line between governing body and criminality; a commune trying to make The Eye self-sufficient through novel food production methods; a charitable organisation driving new colonisation efforts; and a curious assortment of forgotten AI constructs. It is into this diverse and fragile fringe society that your Sleeper finds themselves, with no friends, no stable work, and no access to the stabiliser drugs essential for maintaining their synthetic bodies.

    It is, admittedly, and incredibly menu-driven game, but you can still find joy in mundane interactions once you’ve become familiar with station life.

    To survive, you’ll need to explore, find work opportunities, forge new friendships, and decide what purpose your new life serves on the edge of the inhabited universe. You do that by way an abstract and menu-driven system that is mechanically simple and intuitive yet, thanks to the incredible writing and characterisation, still engaging and frequently tense. If you strip away the narrative layer, Citizen Sleeper is a combination of timers, meters, dice rolls modified by a simple skill tree, and player choices that shape future interactions. It sounds incredibly dry, but like a table-top RPG led by an experienced GM, simple actions can be thrilling with the right narrative framing and high stakes.

    Each cycle, you awake hungry and watch the condition of your synthetic body deteriorate. Each cycle, you’re dealt five or less dice that dictate your chances of successfully completing a job to earn currency to buy food or stabiliser drugs; values that influence your chances of mastering a social interaction that could improve your local reputation; or the exact values required to hack systems within The Eye’s vast and collapsing information network.

    Completing “drives” – a mix of optional and mandatory quest lines – reward you with skill points you can invest in a skill tree that both improves your dice rolls and provides useful perks.

    Every time the story imposes a cycle limit before events transpire or limits the number of times you can bungle a task, a segmented ring slowly fills up with abstract but terrifying red markers. Combined with the ever-present hunger and condition meters, they serve as a constant reminder you are living on the edge, and every decision is meaningful.

    The gameplay mechanics can generate tension well enough, but what makes Citizen Sleeper special is how almost every interaction, be that player choice or dice roll, is linked to a specific faction or character. Through repetition, you’ll come to know them all, and through constant engagement, you’ll dig deeper into their lives. You’ll unlock new interactions with a cast of troubled but often hopeful citizens and slowly establish yourself on The Eye. You’ll soon realise Citizen Sleeper has few fail states beyond locking you out of some endings, but thanks to great writing and multiple quest outcomes, it’s incredibly satisfying to define your character through their choices and interactions with others – regardless of whether you choose to settle on The Eye or find a way to move on.

    So much of the game is just meters, timers, and dice rolls, but context is everything.

    Wrapping up, Citizen Sleeper is any easy addition to an ever-growing list of iconic indie games that demonstrate how much you can achieve with very little. It’s like a well-written choose-your-own-adventure novel, in which triggering the next turn of the page means engaging in some simple but satisfying table-top-style dice rolls that can sometimes work for or against you. Citizen Sleeper also remains a timely reminder that if you are looking for a place in a community, you should be looking for a collective of individuals that share your values and struggles, not some monolithic organisation – be that corporate, political, or religious – with the expectation of your adherence to some ideological dogma that those in charge rarely follow themselves.

    Citizen Sleeper was played on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One, PS4/5, and Nintendo Switch.