The Alters

The thing is, The Alters is absolutely amazing. This is a SUPER ambitious game. However, about half way through, I started to get really sick of the way the story and choices are designed, and it totally ruins what could have been an outright masterpiece. The Alters OOZES with atmosphere and intrigue right from the start. This is a survival/management/building game with an immersive choice driven story. It's well written, it's well voice acted, and the game is absolutely BEAUTIFUL. At an early point in the game, in the first act, I realized choices I've made have completely screwed me over. This was on two separate levels. Several choices I made with my alters have screwed me into a spot where I won't be able to meet a challenge I have to overcome in time, so we're dead. And several choices I've made on how I choose to spend time and resources have also screwed me over, which will also kill us. With most games that progress SOLELY on a players choices, the story then too progresses along with it. If you make a choice that pisses off some characters, then those characters opinions will change, they may sabotage you, leave, hell even try to kill you. But regardless, the story continues based on the choices you've made. If you made a bad choice that screws you over, so be it, your playthrough will be a lot more challenging. With The Alters, it doesn't go down like that. Instead you can make choices that are unknowingly going to block you into a corner down the road. Because little do you know, there will be major twists and turns along the way that you couldn't have forseen. There will be buildings and material requirements that you had no idea were coming. So you WILL get stuck, and you WILL have to replay large portions of the game. You will go into the game expecting a non-linear, branching, storyline that progresses based on the choices you've made. But instead, you end up with a very immersive non-linear game that is wrapped around a somewhat narrow and linear storyline. There are different ways to progress and beat the challenges, but there are many decisions you can make that will block you from finding a path forward. To bring it back to the first time I hit this dead end in Act I. I reload an auto save from the VERY well done and well thought out auto save system that was around 3 hours of gameplay earlier than where I was currently stuck. At first I was like wow what a great and forgiving auto save system. I start going back through certain story points and once again, I'm like wow what a great conversation system, It remembers and shows me the choices I made the first time I played through this conversation. This way I can easily change or keep choices I made earlier. Then I got to Act 2, hit another dead end, had to restart, and another, and another. And I realize that it's not so much that the game is difficult or challenging, it's that the game hides so much from you that there is no way you will know what you actually HAVE to do. This was specifically designed for you to have to fail, start over, and do it all over again. The auto save system, and conversation choice feature aren't there to let you go back and replay sections so you can see what the other outcomes would have been, the game is designed to force you to replay massive sections of game so you can change your choices and priorities to meet an upcoming, unforseen issue. You play through the game as you see fit, not having any idea there are multiple things you HAVE to be doing if you you want to succeed, but you're never told that's the case. It would be one thing if I hit a game over because I didn't do any research, or I mismanaged my resources, things like that. It would be one thing if my choices led me down a much more difficult path forward than if I had chosen differently. But the Alters just kinda drops things on you at the last second that you have absolutely no way of overcoming unless you had spent the entire act specifically preparing for that to happen. Meaning it would be pure luck that you spent an entire act spending the exact right amount of resources on the exact right types of things to end up in a place where you can complete the next objective. Act 2 is a perfect example of why this isn't good game design. If you start act 2 and decide to quickly set up resource nodes and build up your stocks.... or maybe try to get the special rare resource early on because you think it will be important..... You'll have no idea that you already started to screw up. Because you would have no idea you need to slap down a scanner as soon as possible, to progress to the next step, because you NEED TO learn about two very large and expensive towers you will also be building in order to move on. So you would have no idea you need to build up a certain amount of specific resources and also use them very sparingly on other crafting/building. You would then also not know that those towers will need a specific number of Alters to work them because you aren't told that until the very last step, which would be right before you're leaving and moving on to act 3. So... thought you were being frugal and smart by having only 2 or 3 alters and minimizing resource consumption...and avoiding possible conflicts more Alters could bring? Well as it turns out you were screwing yourself over because little do you know you need 4 of them, and you're only told this at the VERY LAST step, right before you're (so you think) about to leave to the next area/act 3. What you're left with is a game that could probably be beaten in 6-7 hours if it weren't for the huge amounts of time you will spend replaying sections of the game to try and change things in a way that allow you to complete the current act. Of my 17 hours I've played, I would say 12 of those were all spent replaying areas I had already played, in some cases for the 3rd and fourth time. It feels extremely on the nose, almost like they knew a 6-7 hour game in this genre wouldn't cut it so they designed it this way to extend the play time. Honestly that just really killed it for me. It's BS that there are so many things dropped on you the last second purposely forcing you to replay entire 2-3-4-5 hour sections of the game. I'm in the 3rd act now facing my first road block and I just do NOT feel like loading up an old save, again, and replaying the last several hours, again. This could have been fixed easily if, for instance, when you get a new "quest" or "to-do" item, you are given the entirety of that quest in a list. Then each of the steps listed out that you will end up doing, with a brief readout of each step you will be facing. This way you can get the main Act 2 storyline quest, look at the list of steps and say, "Oh look, there will be two large towers I have to build in the 3rd step, and they will be expensive, and they need 4 alters to operate them in the 4th step, so I will need to make sure I have four willing alters ready to go before we try and leave". I get that this would break a bit of the immersion factor, as there would be a few less surprises. But believe me, this game already has a TON of great surprises coming, you didn't need to take the immersive storytelling to such an extreme. As this simultaneously wastes the players time, which then completely breaks immersion by having to stop and replay huge sections, and so often. As I said, The Alters is a very ambitious game. A survival/management/building game that has an extremely well written, interesting, immersive, and choice driven story? That's pretty much never been done before. And I can't help but admire the effort here. But unfortunately I think they went a little TOO ambitious with the immersive story telling side because the gameplay side got the short end of the stick in return. and I just can't recommend it if I don't even want to finish it myself, and feel like most of the game is just having your time wasted.

The Alters has a strong atmosphere, an interesting story, and impressive visuals. These parts of the game work well and make the world feel engaging. However, the main problem is the speed of the in-game day timer. The day passes too quickly, and there is not enough time to actually enjoy the game. The constant time pressure ruins much of the experience. There is no time to properly absorb the atmosphere, appreciate the graphics, carefully read the in-game texts, explore locations, or think through the game’s systems and story. Everything has to be done in a hurry. Instead of feeling immersed, the player is constantly forced to rush. This constant pressure becomes irritating and undermines many of the game’s strongest qualities. This could be fixed by adding a gameplay option that allows players to adjust the speed of the in-game day cycle. Letting players slow down the passage of time would make the experience much more enjoyable without removing the challenge for those who want it. In its current state, the game causes more frustration than enjoyment.

[h1]Great idea ... for a novel[/h1] Such an interesting concept! What would happen if in a life or death situation you met with your alteregos? What would happen? What would you learn? Unfortunately it simply doesn't work as a game, or at least in this game. I don't think it would work otherwise either as a game. The idea can only be explored if you learn/experience the other perspectives. In a game though that can be difficult. You have to experience their lives, but making that much gameplay is unfeasible. So instead you read about it. And reading in a game is always odd. A game is about doing, reading is about imagining. [h2]Yapp yapp yapp[/h2] You are expected to read and have conversations with your alters all the time. They whine about everything, they are having existential breakdowns daily and after a while it is just exhausting. The conversations aren't interesting either. At all. It is all about these basic life choices and how things change just on seemingly small events. Could be interesting but it isn't. The dialog isn't nearly as good as it should be. The alters feel very shallow. They are this cookie cutter images of ideas of personas: A Scientist: super logical, emotionless, efficient A Botanist: very emotional, soft spoken and timid A Doctor: calm, even and methodical A Miner: a rough, alcoholic, drug addict who doesn't care Etc. it is just boring. Every time you need to wake one up, you have to have a boring conversation that always looks like this: alter: "Oh this is messed up" you: "Chill, it is okay" And it also takes minutes. It becomes annoying after a while. By the end of act 2 I couldn't listen to their prattle. It doesn't matter. It is just this emotional dumpster of whining and nihilism. [h3]Voice acting[/h3] All this is further impeded by the voice acting. Jan's actor is trying hard to sound as different people, but it just feels very forced. Don't think he did a bad job, I think the job was bad. Don't think there are many voice actors on the planet that could pull of x versions of themselves. This leaves you with people who speak a little rougher, little angrier, little softer, little slower. As if you took the range of 1 person and divided it up between x. All of them feel flat because of it. Not to mention everybody speaks so slowly. Why is the dialog so slow? As if we where listening to some drama class practice where everyone is deliberately practicing to form every syllable. [h2]Gameplay/Game loop[/h2] There isn't much gameplay there. It masquerades as an economy simulator, but it isn't. You can mine, build a little, shuffle buildings around and then wait. A day is too short to achieve much and still interrupted by all the useless yapping. The interface for it is also needlessly complicated. A tab to assign alters to a task (to a post really), another tab where you can set what should happen at each post, another tab for setting research. These should have been one window at most. It is also buggy. Often some post runs out of things to do and the alter will just sit there and not mention it. Other times they even offer to change into other positions. Also what you can do changes depending on where you are. If you are in the base, you can't see the map, to plan where you want to build. If you are outside you can't see the state of your base, so you can't tell if you need to put the technician into fixing something. Unless you are on the build management tab you can't see what each building costs to build. You can't see this tab unless you are in the base and walk into the appropriate room. [h3]Storage and UI are barely usable[/h3] You can only move the base if you have enough organics to move. Yet it display so incomprehensibly what you have and what you need that it boggles the mind. You want to move the base but if it is too heavy, it will show something like this: 300 > 300 ! What the hell does that mean? What is my tank capacity? That will show something like 150 + 150. Ok so I have 300 hundred, then why is 300 > 300? Then I had to read online that only the first 150 number is my tanks capacity. The mass of my base is 300. So why doesn't the UI display that 300 > 150? Okay then I wanted to make weight. Had to search online again to see that actually I can throw away items from the storage, after failing to even delete any more buildings. Guess what? You are not allowed to delete buildings, only if you can store their reclaimed resources in storage. But if you have no storage space left? No building deletion for you. But you can delete items from storage, so why can't the building with its materials be deleted? It is just so annoying. TLDR: Interesting idea for a novel, but it really should not have been a game.