11 Bit Studios, responsible for This War of Mine (and many others), hits us in the feelings again with The Alters, a survival Sci-fi that mixes exploration, base management and “dating-sim”. It runs well on Linux and Steam Deck.

You play as Jan Dolski, a builder worker and, because of a life-support problem on the crew capsules, the only surviving member of an expedition to mine rare elements in a newly discovered world.

You soon realize that you are in a race against the nearby star radiation. Having to run away from the sunrise to a darker place on the planet. It is pretty clear that you will not be able to man your mobile base, that looks like a humongous bike tire, by yourself.

You are steered to clone yourself, but not any kind of clone, Alters (ta-da). The rare mineral you find, plus your base weird computer, allow you to pluck memories from alternative timelines, where you took different decisions: What if I stand up my abusive dad? What if I dedicated more to my craft? What if I was a better partner to my now ex-wife? What if I made a better choice for facial hair?

Life	Path

Jan Dolski is unremarkable, but his Alters excel in different fields, like base maintenance, mining, researching and many others, they will help you overcome many challenges in your way to avoid a miserable radiation death.

When you leave your base, you are in exploration mode, you roam the planet picking up resources scattered around, finding mineral deposits, and placing mining rigs and connecting pylons to power them up.

Back to your base. You work on, and set your Alters to work on mining resources, researching new tech, maintaining the base, or growing the food to keep you all happy and alive.

Once you finish the objectives in a location, you pack up your base and move to another location further from the lethal sun, rinse and repeat over 3 Acts (+ intro).

What really got me into this game is how the narrative elements tie-up nicely with the gameplay. The people you create are not robotic slaves. You brought them to a reality that does not match their memories, they come with their insecurities and motivations. You will have to navigate their differences, find common ground, and make them happy, so they can execute the tasks to the best of their abilities.

I am usually not a big fan of relationship management games common in dating sims (my intro was a joke, or at least there was no kissing during my gameplay despite the Alters joking about it). But with The Alters I really engaged with their personal stories beyond of getting the perfect work performance. To the point that when exploring I found a movie in one of my lost luggage scattered around the world, one of Jan ex-wife favourite, and I thought “the Botanist will love when we all watch this”.

The game deals with deep subjects, and you have to make tough choices. Not as dark and sad as This War of Mine, but it makes you think a lot about your actions and how they might impact the expedition and people surrounding it.

It related or at least sympathize with The Alters. You find the tipping point that made them stand against their dad, what was the root cause of your failed marriage, and many others personal experiences of your clones. Learning lessons in vulnerability, assertiveness, pragmatism, reliance, etc, as you engage with your Alters (it also unlocks new conversation options that help you in future discussions).

Technical Criticisms

As much as I enjoyed the game, there are some problems and minor improvements required attention here and there.

The game is made with Unreal 5, it has that visual characteristic, movement jankiness and performance problems that come with most games made with that engine.

It forces you to use frame generation if you want playable FPS. I experienced several crashes with DLSS, disabling low latency mode helped a bit. But it was more stable with TSR on a Linux PC with nvidia GPU 2080TI.

The game graphics goes for realism, I am not sure if it is lack of polish, or a mix of Unreal Engine 5 aesthetics and mandatory frame gen. Characters border the uncanny valley a bit, but not so much to make it unsettling.

The music has some highlights that merge well with the story. But if you ask me to hum a tune, I would not be able to remember any.

Movement wise, it is solid most of the time. I usually do not miss a jump button, but rarely you get stuck in map imperfections during exploration. It is quite minor but annoying.

There is a weird form of “combat” in the game, you need to shine a light on some blobs you find on the map, called Anomalies. From all the tasks in the game, it was by far the most tedious. As every single other activity to open a new space in the map involved a bit of a puzzle, talking to people, crafting stuff. In a sense, hunting blobs provides a different form of gameplay when you are exploring, but they refresh in the map after some time, blocking your paths again. At least they provide some resource when you kill them.

The game proposes replayability, by limiting the numbers of alters you can create in a single gameplay and offering multiple endings. But I found little reason to do so.

I could not find justification to get Jan Shrink or Jan Guard because my Alters would behave well as long as there was a supply of good food, cold beer and a punch bag to let out steam. Maybe in harder difficulties that would be different.

Some Alters are also very one-dimensional and there is very little growth, that reduced my interest in engaging with them. Jan Scientist thinks that everything that is not work should be banned - but at least he is great at his job and there are some reality checks for him here and there.

Another problem, is that you only know the benefits of the Alter before creating them. The emotional baggage is not available until you summon them, and many other intricacies while only after interacting with them. That can be fun to some extent, but you don’t know if they would be useless for the first week while you deal with their issues, or go right to work, with minor maintenance.

I also did not feel the need to try for a different ending. It seems that the composite story show during the ending depends on the choices you made in each Act and which objectives you completed. But I felt the decisions I would have to make to change my ending were a bit black and white, and not as nuanced as most of the gameplay. That said, I liked how the Alters would react to every choice, and objective I chose to complete or ignore during the journey.

The elephant in the room: generative AI

While playing, I noticed some weird texts in conversations, or narrative moments. I brushed it out as a minor localization problem from a small studio. It is ok, I grew up on poorly localized games. It was not until the Playstation that I saw the power of a well-made professional localization.

It was not until late in the game that I saw some LLM (large language models) prompts they forgot to clean here and there.

A quick search on DuckDuckGo return me that this news is already blowing up. People sharing screenshots of assets, translations showing ridiculous prompts and back-and-fort like “This text in Portuguese would be:” and “I cannot translate this for this idiom” or comparing the way some Alters respond to how an LLM would reply to you. There were also people sad that they did not disclose the usage of Artificially Generated content on their Steam Store page, for ethical reasons.

11 bit studios issued a statement, claiming those are placeholders, and they have a trustworthy localization teams working on the parts that did not make the release date. A localization patch would come soon.

I give the company the benefit of the doubt. They have a vast portfolio of good narrative-driven games. They have great writers and artists there. Their previous games had good localization. And there was no news of firing people because of generative models.

But what disappointed me most was that they used generic chat LLMs for the translation, when there are plenty of good translation tools and models that would have done a better job with those “placeholders”. With proper tools, you can do it in bulk without generating so many artifacts like prompts, chats, and hallucinations. And it also makes it easy for it to be reviewed by a linguistic professional. Translation tools are nothing new in the dev world.

That said, nothing beats a proper professional localization. One that takes in account the languages (both original and result), domain of the game, context of the region that made it, and the region that will consume it.

Steam Deck

The game has full controller support. It is tagged as Playable by Steam, because of the small characters. The HUD is also small, but if you are used to the game options, it might not be an issue.

FSR	TSR

With every graphics settings on low, you will be looking at ~40 FPS with frame generation TSR, and ~70 FPS with FSR 3. Both options hitting close to 23W of power drain.

It is not my cup of team to play on the Deck, mostly for the power drain and the frame generation artifacts. But if you like the game, it can be played on the go with the Steam Deck.

Last remarks

Despite the problems and controversies, I still think The Alters is a good game and bound to compete with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for some awards this year.

That said, depending on your preferred language to play. It might be worth waiting for the localization patch and fixes.

The game will be part of our recommended games list.

Note: We were provided a game key by the developers.