It's hard not to be eager for The Alters, the scifi survival game from Frostpunk developer 11 Bit Studios that our Joshua Wolens once described as "Subnautica plus Midnight Suns except instead of Wolverine and Blade you’re juggling your relationships with several clones of a working class Polish guy." With a pitch like that—and a promising showing—you can imagine our disappointment [[link]] when after left the Alters with an uncertain launch timeline.
That timeline just got a lot more [[link]] certain. Thanks to a shown during today's Triple-I Initiative showcase, The Alters has locked in a release date on June 13.
In The Alters, you play as humble spaceman Jan Dolski, the single, stranded survivor of a failed expedition to an alien planet. Unfortunately, that planet will finish the job when its next sunrise melts Jan and his mobile space-base into slag.
With a bit of quantum computing and experimental space matter, however, Jan finds a makeshift solution: He can pluck alternate versions of himself from parallel timelines, letting him can delegate the necessary elements of base building, tech research, and general survivalism in an effort to escape back to space through the combined effort of the Interdimensional Council of Jans.
Unfortunately, as the trailer above highlights, putting a bunch of clones in a doomed survival situation tends to produce some interpersonal friction, and escaping annihilation will require as much conflict resolution as it does resource gathering. Some of the alt-Jans, like his Otacon-coded researcher-self, seem agreeable enough. Others will need more delicate management, like the ones who come from a timeline where they're still married to his ex-wife and might demand to speak to her.
That's still an improvement over Miner Jan, who's apparently inclined to cut off his own limbs as a sort of existential protest. My sympathies to whoever has to handle the HR paperwork if Jan makes it offworld.
launches on June 13.