I took my alternate-universe self on a pierogi date in the Subnautica-style survival game from This War of Mine's creators, and now I can't wait to see more

GamesSurvival & CraftingThe AltersI took my alternate-universe self on a pierogi date in the Subnautica-style survival game from This War of Mine’s creators, and now I can’t wait to see moreWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Multiple versions of Jan Dolski quarrel with each other in keyart for The Alters.

What if the team that made This War of Mine mixed Subnautica and Midnight Suns, but instead of Spider-Man and Venom you were juggling your relationship with like 10 clones of a working-class Polish guy?

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Journeying across volcanic terrain in The Alters.

Let me fly far away from here

All very Subnautica, but Jan doesn’t have to craft himself a base out of salvaged iron and fish guts. He’s now the sole proprietor of the enormous mobile base that his deceased fellow crewmates used to staff. That’s where he stays and—in a base-building mode reminiscent of the XCOM ant farm—that’s what he’s pouring most of his resources into upgrading.

As game director Tomasz Kisilwicz told me, it’s “a big shift” from the relatively simple gameplay and artstyle of This War of Mine, which he and lead designer Rafał Włosek worked on previously, but it’s one that happened organically. “That wasn’t a goal for us, necessarily, [to say] ‘Okay, now we want to move on from things like This War of Mine’… We had this idea… and we started adding up those layers.”

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

A shot of the base from The Alters, showing its ant-farm style layout.

He needs help running the joint, in short. With the crewmembers whocouldhave staffed the base all dead, he’s forced to get creative. Aboard the ship are complete mental and genetic scans—the entire lifepath—of all its crew. It also (thanks to the handwave-y magic of quantum computing) is capable of figuring out whatwouldhave happened if you’d made different decisions at pivotal points in your life. What if Jan had stayed at home and stood up to his abusive dad? What if he’d stayed in university? What if he’d sacrificed everything to hold his marriage together?

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(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Assigning Alters to workstations in The Alters.

It can get fraught, and Kisilewicz is keen to emphasise the personal nature of Jan’s story, and it’s one of his key examples of “the DNA and philosophy from [This War of Mine]” carrying over into this newer, grander thing.

Anyway, the answer to those questions is that Jan would be a very different person, and one with all sorts of different skills that might, perhaps, come in handy if you had to run a base on an alien planet. University Jan would have been a brilliant scientist, the Jan who stood up to his dad became a gruff technician, another would have been a miner, and so on and so on.

All alone, more or less

The wonders of Rapidium—which Jan’s very deadly planet is rich in—are such that Jan can take those forks and physically grow them in the base, creating the titular Alters. Then he can put them to work doing what they do best: Research, mining, maintenance, you name it.

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Crafting equipment in The Alters.

But you have limited slots for staff, which means you have to pick and choose who—and which talents—you value. For me, that was science and mining. I wanted the goodies hidden away higher up the tech tree and I kept running out of the resources I needed to craft new equipment and rooms for my base. Plus, actually mining myself, rather than assigning an Alter to it, took up time in the day I could have spent exploring.

So I summoned into existence a Jan whose life was a long string of tragedies—sacrificing his dignity for a job offer from his dad, losing his arm in an industrial accident—to help me claw metal out of the ground, and another who had stayed in university to help research what to do with it.

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

A life path in The Alters.

Which means on top of being a mish-mash of all those games I’ve already mentioned, it’s also basically the videogame version of 1998’s hottest reality-swapping Gwyneth Paltrow romcom:Sliding Doors. You’ve always wanted it.

Which is where we get to the Midnight Suns bit. You’re not deploying these alter-Jans in card-based battles (at least not that I saw, though I’m keeping my fingers crossed), but you do have to manage your relationships with them.

For the most part, the ingrates aren’t too happy that you’ve yanked them into reality to possibly die on a hostile planet

For the most part, the ingrates aren’t too happy that you’ve yanked them into reality to possibly die on a hostile planet, and in my time with the game basically all my Alters started out absolutely furious with me for putting them in this situation. That’s on top of the fact these are all versions of Jan that made different choices, and might be angry atyourJan for making the wrong ones. The Jan who stood up to his dad wasn’t happy to learn the Jan I was playing had meekly left home instead, and my excuses only made him unhappier.

People pleaser

So they have to be soothed and made content, or content as can be. How you do that depends on the Alter in question. “When you’re discussing something with the scientist,” says Kisilewicz, “you can appeal to his reason, to his ambition, but when you talk with the technician, maybe a more empathetic approach would be better, maybe being more down to earth.” My own attempts to treat scientist-Jan with kid gloves—encouraging him to rest up before getting to work—ended up biting me. He instantly pieced together what was happening as soon as I pulled him from the clone pod and didn’t appreciate my condescension.

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Encountering Rapidium in The Alters.

Making things harder, while you can “sort of try to please everyone” in conversation, “you can’t please everyone with your strategic decisions” about how you run and move the base. I didn’t get into this much myself, but it had begun to crop up just as I reached the end of my time with the game. My Alters were becoming quite keen to tell me what course I should chart next.

Kisilewicz called writing each of the Alters a “monster” of a task: Each of their own narratives can branch over the course of the game, meaning you have “the main storyline, which has branches, then underneath little storylines of the Alters that are also branching out… That’s enough to complicate it for us a lot, but also to make it, I think, attractively complex for the players.”

So you build them dormitories, try to pick the right assuaging dialogue in conversations, and even participate in little team-building activities to keep your alternate selves from tearing your throat out. Kind of like mushroom-picking with Blade, except you’re sharing pierogies or movies with the version of yourself whose marriage didn’t end in ashes. I mean that seriously: one alternate-Jan and I only broke the ice after we cooked our mother’s pierogi recipe together.

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Running along a cliff-edge in The Alters.

Looking forwards

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Jan wanders around the base in The Alters.

And if not? I’ll take all the pierogi dates with my alternate-universe selves as I can get

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Let me fly far away from here#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

All alone, more or less#

People pleaser#

Looking forwards#

Let me fly far away from here

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

All alone, more or less

People pleaser

Looking forwards