The Alters has been revealed by 11 bit Studios, the makers of This War of Mine and Frostpunk. Blending psychological horror, 80s sci-fi, curious mysteries and survival strategy, the game is up to wishlist on Steam, Epic and GOG.com.
Tomasz Kisilewicz, Lead Artist on the game, appeared on the PC Gaming Show to discuss some of the themes and ideas feeding into their latest take on the survival strategy genre.
You play as Jan, a space builder stranded on a distant alien planet who simply wants to try and survive and find a way home on his weird ring ship filled with habitable shipping container type things. To do this, he has to create ‘Alters’ of himself. They’re not quite clones, but with the pastiche 80s pop in the soundtrack of the trailer, I’m sure some of you might have had “I think we’re a clone now” in your mind.
Anyway, back to the Alters, which are created variants of Jan, each able to have distinct character skills and traits. It’s from this that elements of psychological horror and an underlying mystery. This is brought to the player through binary decisions, bringing up the fundamental question “what if?” as you head down deeper and darker paths.
There’s a lot to this that sounds very tricky to do, but given what 11 bit was able to achieve with This War of Mine and Frostpunk, I’m sure many will have faith in them doing so. They’re also making Frostpunk 2, so there’s plenty of gutting decision making to do.
Looking back at that first game, Jason wrote in our Frostpunk review:
“Frostpunk is a horrifyingly playable post-apocalyptic survival game that demands more out of you than most games ever could. Each decision and each sacrifice you make is hard on your city and on you. There are so many impossible choices and no win situations that the game is almost hard to play, but it’s so compelling that you will be unable to step away from it. The only real negative is the sheer overwhelming nature of the world the game is set in, and really that is more of a compliment to the designers than anything else.”
