Call me a Paranoid Android or a Suspicious Stanley, but when I ask a videogame developer a question and the videogame developer pauses for exactly 31 seconds and then says “no”, I tend to assume the answer is, in fact, “yes”. Or at least “it’s complicated”, to channel a bit of antique Facebook coyness. The Alters is a complicated game. It is a moody sci-fi extravaganza in which your character, beleaguered offworld miner Jan Dolski, has to create new versions of himself by branching off his own past timeline using a “quantum computer”, splitting the chain of events at trigger points by, say, having his younger self stand up to his domineering father rather than leaving home.
The result is a rolling space base full of alternate, vat-grown Jans, from bitter repairman Jans to aloof scientist Jans and all the many glittering gradations of Jan that lurk betwixt. The Jans have a hard time getting along, initially. The shared existential horror of everybody being a version of everybody else aside, they all represent each other’s roads-not-taken, a premise that leaves ample room for resentment, envy and contempt. But jolly along they must, in order to operate the aforesaid rolling space station and escape the apocalyptic planet they’re stranded on. Assuming you make the right dialogue decisions as Jan Prime, and ensure each Jan’s material needs are met while upgrading and expanding the station, this practical objective will produce a growing closeness, punctuated by swirly notifications about changes of emotional state, which feels like one big, baroque metaphor for a guy making peace with his own past and warring urges.
It’s both a fun narrative setup and the makings of a production nightmare, to say nothing of the presumably enormous strain placed upon the vocal chords and mental coherence of Jan’s sole voice actor, Alex Jordan. There’s the intricacy of each Jan’s personality in itself, and then there’s the problem of writing up all their interactions, and how they might develop in response to each other – depending on which Jans the player decides to spawn in whatever order. 11 bit have managed this potential for overwhelming complexity by, firstly, only giving you charge of one Jan, the primary Jan who gets to sleep in the captain’s bedroom at the base’s heart, and secondly, by firmly resisting the temptation to do a Flanders family reunion and conjure up a Jan for every genre or season. There are, as far as I can tell, no Janpunks, Cowboy Jans, Jan 3000 BC’s or other Expanded Janiverse misadventures in The Alters. 11 bit has limited the population carefully to keep the quality up and suit the particular narrative dilemmas they want to explore.
