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Jan Dolski is in a tough spot. His spaceship has crash-landed on a hostile planet and he’s the only survivor. Soon the alien sun will rise, bringing with it a lethal dose of radiation he must avoid at all costs. He scrambles to the wreckage of his craft but finds it only semi-operational. To get it moving, he has to scan the planet, gather resources and perform repairs. It’s far too much work for one Jan Dolski. But it might be possible for four of him.
Here is the brilliant conceit of new game The Alters (one not dissimilar to that of recent film Mickey 17). Jan is able to use a powerful element called rapidium to clone himself and so create more workers to help him move the ship. The twist is that these “alters” are not exact copies of Jan, but instead parallel universe versions of who he would be if he’d taken different decisions at pivotal moments in his life. So while our Jan went to university, leaving his mother at the mercy of her abusive husband, one of his alters decided to stay by her side. One alter got divorced, another became a mechanic. Inevitably as the clones multiply, they come into conflict, leading to a thoughtful exploration of free will, regret and the eternal allure of paths not taken.
The themes and narrative of The Alters are only half of the game, however. Much of your time is spent gathering resources on the planet’s surface, building your base and managing your team of clones. Its mechanical pleasures are informed by one of gaming’s most influential and evergreen genres — the survival game.
The set-up of a typical survival game is simple. You find yourself alone in a vast, hostile environment with minimal equipment, and you have to find a way to survive for as long as you can. This usually means gathering resources, then using them to build tools and shelter. Where there are enemies, it is usually prudent to avoid them rather than engage in combat — unlike the power fantasies of shooters, these games emphasise your fragility.
Survival games are captivating because they speak to something primal: the human drive to master an environment, the need to create shelter. Often the key is incremental empowerment; in genre stalwart Minecraft you begin by constructing crude huts, but ultimately graduate to vast palaces. An addictive feedback loop satisfies the lizard brain: gather resources to craft new items. These new items enable you to gather new resources to craft new items. And on it goes.
There are also more sophisticated pleasures: the fact that you must often manage your character’s hunger, tiredness and cold deepens your attachment to them, upping the emotional stakes when resources dwindle and night draws in. Survival games offer longevity with randomly generated worlds and unpredictable systems, allowing you to exercise creativity in your approach.
The best examples also boast worlds of impressive beauty and depth. The alien planet of The Alters is full of oily seas, fractal rock structures and rivers of lava under moody indigo skies. Genre favourite Subnautica presents a captivating underwater universe to explore; The Long Dark sets players in a vast, pitiless tundra; Don’t Starve’s forest draws from the gothic style of Tim Burton. In these games, the surrounding world is both the greatest threat and your only chance for salvation.
Over the past decade, many of the most popular survival games, such as Rust and Grounded, have been played online, allowing gamers to work together with friends or enter into delicate games of trust with strangers. A recent addition is Dune: Awakening, which cleverly makes the vast deserts of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novels the setting for a survival challenge in which you manage hydration and flee monstrous sandworms. Developers have been able to hybridise the flexible formula with seemingly any genre or theme: vampire (V Rising), Viking (Valheim), zombie (DayZ), dinosaur (Ark: Survival Evolved), fantasy (Enshrouded), driving (Pacific Drive) and even a family-friendly take in the new Survival Kids for Switch 2.
The Alters is a stylish, impressive game that uses survival mechanics to deliver a linear, thoughtful narrative. But, at its core, the magic of the wider survival genre lies not in authored storytelling, but rather in how these games allow players to craft their own sagas by interacting freely with interlocking systems of environments, resources and threats. This “emergent narrative” is something only games can offer.
Because you might remember a conventional game’s scripted story — dosed evenly in cut scenes and pre-written dialogue — for a while. But that hundred-day run in The Long Dark, during which you spent hours crafting a bearskin coat, narrowly escaped scurvy and limped away from a hungry wolf only to fall through a hole in the ice and die just metres from your shelter? That story is yours alone, and you’ll remember it forever.
‘The Alters’ is available now for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Windows
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