The Alters

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Lemmingwiser

Shady
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Dec 15, 2022
Here's the next game from the polish company that made this war of mine and frostpunk.

A spoiler explaining the story from beginning to end:

The premise is that you're a builder who goes on a space mission. The rest of the crew died in the crash landing. In order to get the necessary expertise to get the mobile base running and get to a rendezvous point where you can be rescued, you have to clone yourself.

But instead of regular clones, you use a quantum computer to analyse how your life would have been different if you made different choices, so they ended up having different career paths, personalities and so on.

The game is well made in a number of ways. It looks much better than the box art suggests

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You'd think it was a gay dating simulator, instead of space survival mining simulator with a social politics element.

There's things to like about the game.

It's reasonably well written and the first act of the game is quite strong. There's something naturally satisfying from having satisfactory style 3D strip mining without having to get stuck in complete logistical management insanity.

The game generally communicates well when you're making big irreversable choices and when they're minor stylistic answers.

One key element that helps is understanding each of the crew members and telling them what they want to hear each time you talk to them. They're all flat characters that can be described by two or three words each.

They're easy to tell apart visually and also by how they sound which is well done considering they're all voiced by the same guy.

I like the creativity of the premise. Exploring the mysteries is fun, but it's definitely much too handheld. You never get space to think, it's all spelled out.

The only reason I started this thread is so I could bitch about it, so now that I've laid the groundwork, here it comes.

The idea of managing a base run by clones with different life choices is great. But the actual characters are as flat as can be.

Technician is about self reliance and assertiveness. He's a real pain the back and the antagonist in act 3. What makes him angry is a little contrived. He's one of the only two alts I liked. His life choice was sticking around with mom, which also made him stand up to dad instead of running away.

Botanist is the one that decided to simp for his own wife. He's always nearly crying. He's the only alt that seems compatible with your wife (you are not) and he does it by being overly emotional and kowtowing to her. I do like the botanist ending more than any other, though.

The scientist like the technician are the two non-optional alts. He is the only rational character. For some reason he has glasses which is dumb. There is nothing about him that isn't cliché.

Refiner is gay and defined by gayness from gay voice to gay mustache to only being happy and positive (gay) and wanting to exercise constantly. Since they're all clones this means you are gay. They are all gay.

The miner is a real pain in the ass to deal with. You are promised someone that is more effective at mining and instead you get a self destructive wreck of a man that is likely to kill himself with opioids, overworking himself, radiation overexposure or by bleeding to death after cutting his own arm off, because he lost his arm in his life and it feels wrong to have it. He is the classic progressive gruff man that just needs to learn to be vulnerable. Ideologically annoying. But it's the only character that makes true character growth and some of it with literary callbacks to camus and moby dick is well written. It's also one of the few characters with real stakes.

The guard is dumb but funny. I underestimated the writing in the early stage as inconsistent on a number of levels, but it turns out it fit together well in the whole picture. He doesn't have much depth like the others, but it's the only character that I think I've actually met someone in my life like before.

The worker is variant path of the refiner so also extra gay, but since it is a game made by lefties, he is also a union leader and all about fighting the corporates, which is a commie IQ tier move when you're completely dependant on then for rescuing you from an alien planet.

The game has a very strong moralizing element against stem cells basicly. One of the big problems of the game in act 2 is only solvable with two different each drastic measures. It didn't make sense to me until I realized the game was made in poland. I think non-christians will find it hard to relate with how harsh characters perceive making a sacrifical non-cognizant clone to help save all the others. Because it's completely out of line with the whole commie view point most of the game is written from, it seems to me. Especially since the less unethical prefferable solution is installing brain chips that gives a corporation both tracking and emotional control.

The endings are very underwhelming. The differences are there but the scene is created poorly.

The ending feels more like an intro than an ending.

I had fun, which is why I wanted to offload some of the stuff that bothered me. I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price.

I generally enjoyed the game, the exploration, the building and crafting.
 
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The premise is that you're a builder who goes on a space mission. The rest of the crew died in the crash landing.
Inst that the plot of factorio?
In order to get the necessary expertise to get the mobile base running and get to a rendezvous point where you can be rescued, you have to clone yourself.
That doesn't make any sense at all, why didn't the crew just clone themselves beforehand so that the clones would die in their place.
But instead of regular clones, you use a quantum computer to analyse how your life would have been different if you made different choices, so they ended up having different career paths, personalities and so on.
Okay... this game is gonna suck ass.
Too many conflicting points for the story to make sense.
The story would be much better if it was about some random redneck fuck finding the crashed spaceship, then fucking around with the clone machine.
 
That doesn't make any sense at all, why didn't the crew just clone themselves beforehand so that the clones would die in their place.
Your mission is run by a crazy scientist who got demoted to the position of mission control after his experiments in rewriting memory. Also, you discover a rare new element that was only theorized which allows for rapid biological growth that you use to grow full people in a day. What he advises you to do is illegal and depending on your choices in the game you get him fired and replaced or you work with him to let him continue his plans.

Inst that the plot of factorio?

Yes, factorio, satisfactory, planet crafter, it's a common theme.

As i suspected, they just had to have a faggot in the game, off the buy list this woke garbage goes.

I saw a couple of steam questions of "is this game woke" and then people calling for bans just for asking the question, which moved me to write the OP as well and making sure to include that information.
 
Good OP. It really sounds to me like Rick and Morty plotline, that's basically some science concept without any real justification. The premise can work with a pure comedy tone, since any drama is undercut by the silliness.

Gay character could be based if it was due to being raped/groomed by a gay man in his past. But it sounds like the usual leftist insanity of everyone being gay.
 
Good OP. It really sounds to me like Rick and Morty plotline, that's basically some science concept without any real justification. The premise can work with a pure comedy tone, since any drama is undercut by the silliness.

Gay character could be based if it was due to being raped/groomed by a gay man in his past. But it sounds like the usual leftist insanity of everyone being gay.
Thanks.

Yeah. There is no real reason why the quantum computer is able to analyze your brain and figure out how your life would have gone differently if you made different choices. It gets a pass from me because it's fundamentally an interesting premise and actually explored competently to some extend.

I think chris and jack videos are a prime influence, who do comedy skits on concepts like "what if you discover that the lie detector detects lies with 100% accuracy by being all knowing rather than measuring body signals". Because you can find like 10 full videos and play them in game for the alters. So yeah very rick and morty in scientific fidelity.

One of the weird things that happens is that the scientist asks earth to send blueprints for a specific technology. But then it turns out it wasn't discovered because it's one of his undergraduates that discovers the technology and that didn't happen because you never became a scientist so didn't guide him. But he manages to discover it anyways with just 2 days of research.

You see that further in how much the game is "yay science". The scientist is almost always right. He's the only one that doesn't need constant emotional reinforcement and when he comes to you with an idea it's something useful like "we can occasionally work 12 hours instead of 8 to maximize success chance".

There are other times where there are conflicts between the scientist and others and the game seems to think the scientist is more right than he would be in the real world. For example there is an informed consent situation with a heavy medical procedure. The demand to get informed consent is framed as spending a day writing documentation and framed as a waste of time. There is never the suggestion of it being possible that the scientist view is just a best guess. Another is when the dumb macho miner worries about microparticles and wants new air filters. It really sounds like leftists grappling with in their view dumb people questioning vaccines. You can research, make, install the filters, but it is purely framed as something to make a dumb prole happy. While this is possible, it doesn't really fit with the character (who happily works himself to death if you let him) and my experience with construction/miner worker types is that they're the last people to bitch about minor things.

This is the weird thing about he game. I write all this and I would think: what a badly written game. But that's the thing, it is, and it isn't. The dialog flows better than almost any game. The choices make sense and end up meaning what you expect most of the time. Compared to other games, this aspect is really great and imagine if the overal underlaying storyline was better. There are times where you can choose an option like "fuck you" and get a more positive response than if you try to play nice, because you understand the context and the character you're saying it to.

To get back to the premise of the game: the quantum computer somehow can simulate accurately what your life would be like if you made different choices and the knowledge from your alters ends up getting technology from another timeline, and saving someone's life with knowledge from another. If the quantum computer can calculate this, it means it can simulate the universe. If it can simulate the universe, it could just give you the correct technology blueprint from another lifepath.

And yes the gay path is gay. When you talk to your gayself, he reminds you of your gay experimentation in earlier life and your only responses are acknowledging that yeah you're also kinda gay.

The one thing I like from the gayself is that he scolds you for being out of shape and he's dissapointed he's so weak. This is the game making another scientific error. They are dna copies of you, then grown to adult age with rapidium, then brain modified by computer. So yes, the guy who lost his arm has it back. But there is no reason for the fitness being related to your current fitness. If you had lost your arm, they wouldn't be armless either.

I think I've got all thoughts about this game I wanted to get out out now.
 
There are other times where there are conflicts between the scientist and others and the game seems to think the scientist is more right than he would be in the real world. For example there is an informed consent situation with a heavy medical procedure. The demand to get informed consent is framed as spending a day writing documentation and framed as a waste of time. There is never the suggestion of it being possible that the scientist view is just a best guess. Another is when the dumb macho miner worries about microparticles and wants new air filters. It really sounds like leftists grappling with in their view dumb people questioning vaccines. You can research, make, install the filters, but it is purely framed as something to make a dumb prole happy. While this is possible, it doesn't really fit with the character (who happily works himself to death if you let him) and my experience with construction/miner worker types is that they're the last people to bitch about minor things.
It really reminds me of this infamous graph:
1752949478989.webp
You can't be any closer in empathy to literal alternate decision you. It also doesn't really make sense to be that different in intelligence between the different paths besides "har har blue collar guys are stupid".
This is the weird thing about he game. I write all this and I would think: what a badly written game. But that's the thing, it is, and it isn't. The dialog flows better than almost any game. The choices make sense and end up meaning what you expect most of the time. Compared to other games, this aspect is really great and imagine if the overal underlaying storyline was better. There are times where you can choose an option like "fuck you" and get a more positive response than if you try to play nice, because you understand the context and the character you're saying it to.
It sounds like a lot of leftist based media that there is a good idea and execution there that is buried under political insanity.
And yes the gay path is gay. When you talk to your gayself, he reminds you of your gay experimentation in earlier life and your only responses are acknowledging that yeah you're also kinda gay.
I've never heard of gay experimentation, even lesbian experimentation is a meme that is forced by the media.
 
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You can really already tell just by looking at the art style that it's going to be one of those games.
 
You can really already tell just by looking at the art style that it's going to be one of those games.
The cover is bad marketing. The game looks like this most of the time:

outside base:
Screenshot 2025-07-20 135532.webp
Screenshot 2025-07-20 140347.webp
Screenshot 2025-07-20 140246.webp
inside base:
Screenshot 2025-07-20 140045.webp

The moments where the game feels like the cover can be counted on one hand.

You can't be any closer in empathy to literal alternate decision you.

Ehhh, if you think about it, there is only one legal person and it's the original. There are no promises what would happen with the others once back on earth. But because of the DNA match, any one could technically kill the others and just claim to be the original. It's a bit like the uncanny valley. You can't be closer in empathy than alternate you, but because alternate you is so close, there's a kind of competition over who gets to be you.

Like it's lucky that out of all alters there's only one with a love interest in the wife. If it's two or three, there's competition, because there is no alternate wife for the others.
 
You can really already tell just by looking at the art style that it's going to be one of those games.
The cover is just weird, it really doesn't show the management or exploration aspect of the game, and the pink is going to be offputting for regular gamers. But honestly it's a neat game. I would still recommend it despite its quirks.

It sounds like a lot of leftist based media that there is a good idea and execution there that is buried under political insanity.
I wouldn't call it leftist, moreso conflicted. For a game that is so character focused, I would have hoped for more interaction with and inbetween the alters. At the moment it sort of feels like alters dislike each other or have issues to give you a quest or a problem to resolve rather than the conflict feeling harmonious with their characterization.

It didn't make sense to me until I realized the game was made in poland.
That flew over my head, now it does make sense why everyone is so worked up about it.
The endings are very underwhelming. The differences are there but the scene is created poorly.
Same, for a game of this style I would hope for either a long middle with tons of quests to get to know all the characters and build them properly towards one or two endings OR short middle with tons of alternate ends depending on which character you preferred.
I do like the botanist ending more than any other, though.
What's his? Doesn't he have two endings?

Also, like Frostpunk 1 (at launch), it relies a lot more on story than gameplay than I'd expect. It's sort of becoming a trademark for 11 bits. They seem to do games much more focused on giving you a story and evoking emotions rather than arcady games with pure gameplay. Not necessarily bad, but not the direction I hope the studio keeps going in.

Weird design choice with the replay too. When you reload an earlier save, it shows you the dialog options you already attempted before, but this type of game is much better when doing a full replay than reloading an earlier save, so I would have expected something like that in a NG+ rather than on reload.
 
What's his? Doesn't he have two endings?
I believe if you use tabula rasa, you lose people like the botanist forever. I went with the brain implant, which allows you to invite the rebels back in afterwards.

So to get there you have to do brain implant path. Then he asks if you would let him take your place to live the real Jan life, while you escape and live as an altar on the fringes. If you do, you get to play the whole end sequence as the botanist instead of yourself. That also means you can't use any lessons learned in the communication with the rescue team (though that is only flavor anyways).

Finally you get an earth sequence where he talks with Lena and you can see them restarting the relationship and also talking through things about how they're weird; she still thinks of the other one as the real Jan and apologizes for that, while he expresses patience for the fact that they can't pick up where they left of, because that's not where she left of in the relationship.

His other ending is if you decide as botanist, to use neither plan to save the alters, and basically hand over the original and all alters to the corporation. Cold blooded bodysnatcher ending. But Lena knows and won't even talk to you, so the last dialogue is with a lawyer instead of Lena.

I wouldn't call it leftist, moreso conflicted

It's leftish.
 
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One more post about the game now that I can look back at it a bit and doing a second run.

You know though I've had quite a bit to bitch about the game, I really genuinely like it quite a bit. Outside of work hours (and sometimes during) alters wander around the base, and get into a variety of activities. One might light a smoke or rummage in the storage, find some chips, and sit down and eat them while reading a book. There really are a lot of these type of animations. Not only that, they also don't seem completely oblivious to the others. They get into conversations or sit down together at a table to eat breakfast. They get in arguments. Sometimes it's something mild, something it's something significant and you alerted to it. For these you can intervene. Sometimes you just make things worse. Most of the time you have some choice to make that will make at most 1 of them happy.

Although the characters aren't very deep (they're all archetypical, if you know one or two things about them, you can predict most of what they'll say and do, and what would make them happy or sad. But despite that it's too much to call them a cardboard cutout. Because though they didn't put a lot of work in thinking about creating unique characters, they did put work into giving them a layered existence. What you learn about one might all be in the same direction, but a lot of the time the details are still well written, realistic. I find myself doing a second run just because I want to learn more about the characters I didn't have around the first time.

Compared to most games that come out it's actually quite good. A lot of love went into it. I've heard people complain about one of the big moral choices and how the developers clearly thought there was an objectively correct one. But you know what, that's a good thing. Even if you think the developers are wrong, at least they're making choices. It's better than what starcraft 2 did for example, where you have a choice to either trust or not trust a scientist. If you trust her, you save a settlement from being infested. If you don't, it turns out she was infested as well. The game retroactively makes your choice the correct one. It's possible for the end game to be rather rough if you make a series of "wrong" choices, but the game isn't that hard even on the hardest mode.

There was a lot of courage in making the game this way. It's in line with their previous games (frostpunk, this war of mine), but each of these still stand out in the gaming landscape for their atmosphere more than anything.
 
The miner is a real pain in the ass to deal with. You are promised someone that is more effective at mining and instead you get a self destructive wreck of a man that is likely to kill himself with opioids, overworking himself, radiation overexposure or by bleeding to death after cutting his own arm off, because he lost his arm in his life and it feels wrong to have it. He is the classic progressive gruff man that just needs to learn to be vulnerable. Ideologically annoying. But it's the only character that makes true character growth and some of it with literary callbacks to camus and moby dick is well written. It's also one of the few characters with real stakes.
He was my favorite altar in my first playthough. I thought the bait and switch with him was clever because he seemed like an easy pick, but once you select him and read his life path you quickly realize you kinda fucked up and you are now stuck with this sad broken man. I thought that his arc about accepting vulnerability was appropriate because he was the Jan that that just buried all his trauma and baggage deep inside and copes through work and drugs. So him opening up a bit and picking up an old hobby as a healthy outlet was a really fulfilling end for him.


Meanwhile the shrink I made to help the miner has a pretty half baked arc. He is a Jan that coped with his mom dying by running off into the jungle, did lots of psychedelics, became bisexual, and became a psychologist. But his arc doesn't really explore all that and he comes onto the mission with a go with the flow attatude, so he just rolls with everything so there is no growth to be had. Instead his "arc" it is just him and Jan having a few quick therapy sessions and doing some drugs to "open your mind".

I wouldn't call it leftist, moreso conflicted. For a game that is so character focused, I would have hoped for more interaction with and inbetween the alters. At the moment it sort of feels like alters dislike each other or have issues to give you a quest or a problem to resolve rather than the conflict feeling harmonious with their characterization.
It is a resource survival game and the Altar requests are first and foremost intended to get you to waste time and materials to make them happy instead of doing the mission.
My main issue is I wish we had more scenes where you and all the altars gather around and argue over what choice to make letting their own personalities and opinions shine through. They do it once in the whole game, but I think the game should have more roundtable scenes around key decisions to give the altars more agency and a chance to establish rivalries and create more tension as well as help build up the later mutiny.
 
Meanwhile the shrink I made to help the miner has a pretty half baked arc. He is a Jan that coped with his mom dying by running off into the jungle, did lots of psychedelics, became bisexual, and became a psychologist. But his arc doesn't really explore all that and he comes onto the mission with a go with the flow attatude, so he just rolls with everything so there is no growth to be had. Instead his "arc" it is just him and Jan having a few quick therapy sessions and doing some drugs to "open your mind
How do you make text blurry anyways? (edit: ah!)

is the path with the miner different if you have the shrink? In my version I sent him to the psych ward and he solved his problem by reading and interpreting moby dick. Is it different if the shrink is there to help?

I think at some level the writing is flawed from the bias.

The strong man needing to be vulnerable is a constant trope of current "man bad" media messaging. The problem with the other alters is that they just are, they aren't growing, they don't learn a lesson.

You see this in the lessons learned. You learn the lesson of the miner with him. But with all the others you learn it from them.

It could have been possible for the refiner faggot to be a nuisance with his positivity and learn about proper time and place for it.
 
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is the path with the miner different if you have the shrink? In my version I sent him to the psych ward and he solved his problem by reading and interpreting moby dick. Is it different if the shrink is there to help?
I have a feeling it is to serve as a different path to the same ending in case you didn't find Moby Dick.

Miner ends up having a few therapy sessions and would share some of the stuff that they talk about (daddy issues, insecure about being useless, feeling indebted to Jan). His arc ends with him realizing he was being self destructive and that he is his own man. He then wants to take up wood carving as a way to express himself and leave behind some sort of legacy.

The strong man needing to be vulnerable is a constant trope of current man bad media messaging. The problem with the other alters is that they just are, they aren't growing, they don't learn a lesson.

You see this in the lessons learned. You learn the lesson of the miner with him. But with all the others you learn it from them.

It could have been possible for the refiner faggot to be a nuisance with his positivity and learn about proper time and place for it.
That is a really good point. Jan is fundamentally a flawed man so his altars should also have flaws they work though together and maybe have other altars help them with that specific issue. Like both Jan and the botanist could due with a lesson on assertiveness, Jan and the scientist could do with a lesson on compassion, etc. That way the altars aren't just PSAs on how to be a better person and it adds an extra layer for relations between altars as crew composition is more important to getting that lesson. While I found the shrink himself lackluster, I did find needing to sacrifice a crew slot to bring in a altar to help the miner to be an engaging dilemma because it was the one thing I didn't have abundance of by that part of the game.
 
Hate to be a bummer but not sure this game is it, chief.
The people who whine about AI in this way are insane. They're like the english who decried crossbows for being unchristianlike. Only because earlier the crown realized it wanted to be able to levy bowmen and asks the church to teach all men that it was christianlike to practice longbow for an hour after church.
 
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