If Jan had decided to never leave his hometown, for example, he would have become a miner like his father, albeit with a more severe drug problem. ![]() You'll get to pick exactly what Alters you want to bring into being as you progress through the game, and part of its strategy will be deciding what skills you need from them versus what type of personality they have. You explore these formative life choices in the machine's very literal Tree Of Life menu, which shows how Jan's life would have turned out at key branching decision moments. In this world, Jan's corpo overlords have built a machine that lets you replicate yourself - not as a simple like-for-like clone, but as an Alter, a completely distinct, Sliding Doors-style multiverse version of yourself from an alternate timeline. It's a thrilling premise, but that's not even the half of it. Construction happens in a side-on view of your wheel, but you're able to walk around inside the base as well as you go about your daily duties. He has neither the skills or enough hands to run it by himself, and there's also the small matter of the "giant sun" rising behind him that will definitely finish him off for good if he doesn't find a way to escape. Alas, it's not long before disaster strikes and leaves him as the sole survivor on this now very large mobile mining vessel trundling across the planet's surface. ![]() It centres on the story of Jan Dolski, "a man at the crossroad of his life" who goes on a manned mining mission to try and turn his fortunes around. To his credit, even game director Tomasz Kisilewicz describes The Alters as "a weird game" at the start of my hands-off presentation. It's a fascinating blend of ideas, and if 11 bit can stick the landing, I reckon it could end up being something really quite special. You'll also be venturing out onto the planet's surface to gather resources, all while managing your crew of clo- sorry, alternate selves - as you assign their daily work tasks, and then there's the fact that, well, you're all chuffing different versions of the same person and the literal embodiment of what your life might have been like if you'd done X instead of Y, or Y instead of Z. This is indeed a game about sort-of clones living in a big wheely shipping container, but these containers are actually modules you'll be building in XCOM/Fallout Shelter-style chunks to advance the capabilities of your big wheel base as you work to escape the broiling heatdeath that's slowly enveloping the planet. Happily, I've now seen about an hour of The Alters in action at this year's Gamescom, and first impressions are very promising. It didn't really tell us anything about what the game actually is, or how it plays, and we've heard precious little about it since. ![]() Until now, all we've had to go on is a cryptic CG announcement trailer that showed a gaggle of identical clone-looking men in bright pink medical gowns, all of whom seemingly live inside a giant wheel full of shipping containers. What exactly is The Alters? It's a question I've been itching to get answers to ever since Frostpunk and This War Of Mine developers 11 bit Studios first announced their strange new game at notE3 last year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |