Latest news with #JanDolski
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Alters: unintentionally the realest game about parenting I've ever played
Other than during that golden period when they were old enough to play games and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer but hadn't yet become evil teenagers, I don't think I'm very good at parenting. When my kids were babies I felt unnecessary and useless, a feeling I have been reminded of most days since. That's OK. We can't be good at everything. I can read words backwards and upside down but I can never find my house keys. I am brilliant at dancing to the Cure's The Lovecats on Dancing Stage MegaMix but terrible at DIY. Don't get me wrong: I love my children. I like hanging out with them socially as young adults because they are smart, funny and entertaining, but then they remember I am their dad, and everything is ruined as they ask me to do stuff then blame me for everything wrong in their lives. So I took advantage of the fact that they all went away on the same weekend to have some uninterrupted dad time and sink my teeth into a game with depth, without disturbance. That game was The Alters. I loved the concept. You are stuck on a planet and have to clone different versions of yourself to operate the base and survive. That's really clever. Even better: you create the clones by looking at your life path and picking moments when you made certain decisions that led to you becoming the Jan Dolski that you are. For example, if you select the path where you went off to study rather than entering the mines like your dad did, then you clone Jan the Scientist, an ace researcher. If you went to work on oil rigs, you create Jan Worker, a load-lightener. If you decide that all you want to do is sit on your backside all day playing with words, you become Jan Writer. (Except you don't. There is no Jan Writer option, which shows how useless I would be in a survival situation.) It's a compelling game mechanic because you are not only exploring, resource building and problem solving, you are questioning the whole nature of decision making. It makes you go back through your own life, wondering at the choices you made and what could have been different. This is horribly depressing though and I wouldn't recommend it. Stick to the game's story, not your own. The problem is that the more clones you have in The Alters, the more you have to work to keep them fed, healthy and entertained. And they are needy little bastards whose first language is Whine. It didn't matter about the fresh food I gave them, the movies I sat through or the games of beer pong I deliberately lost – the Jan Miner character was determined to be grumpy and confrontational, and Jan Scientist was constantly punchably irritating. Whenever I thought I was triumphing at managing the base – helped by a system that allows you to set up automatic production of important things like radiation filters to keep you safe, and allotting different clones to regularly do specific shifts – I would have to drop what I was doing and run around doing something else for my dependants to keep them happy. You see where I am going with this? Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion The Alters may be pitched as a sci-fi survival game, but really? It's a parenting sim. The very last thing I want to do with my free time. My failures in the game (and there are many) are accompanied by me screaming at the needy sods to give me a break for five minutes. My neighbours probably still think my kids are still at home. I have never felt so strongly that I am the wrong person to play a game that is so right. The script and story are strong, almost like an interactive version of Andy Weir's The Martian. Philosophical concepts are bandied around, such as Camus's idea that heroism is easy, and it's doing the normal things that is the real challenge in life. And the graphics are so distinctive and mesmerising they are works of art. The space base moves around like a futuristic take on Howl's Moving Castle. The game questions the very meaning of existence and what we're supposed to do with it, and it is moving to witness the clones react to their new reality. Some hate you, others are fascinated, but all at points bond with you over shared memories of everything from Mom's pierogies and beloved lava lamps to how you dealt with your abusive father. There is imagination and intelligence in abundance. It would make an incredible novel or animated movie. And 1990s Dominik, who had no kids or responsibilities, would have found marshalling a load of interesting, talented but whiny dependants a fun novelty. It's like The Game of Life, which was a fun board game to play as kids, but hell when we had two in the back seat of our car. Maybe The Alters is the perfect game for you to play if you are thinking about having kids. In fact I urge anyone of child-bearing or rearing age to play it immediately, to see if you are up to the task in real life or if, like me, it all turns out to be too much hard work.
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Alters: unintentionally the realest game about parenting I've ever played
Other than during that golden period when they were old enough to play games and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer but hadn't yet become evil teenagers, I don't think I'm very good at parenting. When my kids were babies I felt unnecessary and useless, a feeling I have been reminded of most days since. That's OK. We can't be good at everything. I can read words backwards and upside down but I can never find my house keys. I am brilliant at dancing to the Cure's The Lovecats on Dancing Stage MegaMix but terrible at DIY. Don't get me wrong: I love my children. I like hanging out with them socially as young adults because they are smart, funny and entertaining, but then they remember I am their dad, and everything is ruined as they ask me to do stuff then blame me for everything wrong in their lives. So I took advantage of the fact that they all went away on the same weekend to have some uninterrupted dad time and sink my teeth into a game with depth, without disturbance. That game was The Alters. I loved the concept. You are stuck on a planet and have to clone different versions of yourself to operate the base and survive. That's really clever. Even better: you create the clones by looking at your life path and picking moments when you made certain decisions that led to you becoming the Jan Dolski that you are. For example, if you select the path where you went off to study rather than entering the mines like your dad did, then you clone Jan the Scientist, an ace researcher. If you went to work on oil rigs, you create Jan Worker, a load-lightener. If you decide that all you want to do is sit on your backside all day playing with words, you become Jan Writer. (Except you don't. There is no Jan Writer option, which shows how useless I would be in a survival situation.) It's a compelling game mechanic because you are not only exploring, resource building and problem solving, you are questioning the whole nature of decision making. It makes you go back through your own life, wondering at the choices you made and what could have been different. This is horribly depressing though and I wouldn't recommend it. Stick to the game's story, not your own. The problem is that the more clones you have in The Alters, the more you have to work to keep them fed, healthy and entertained. And they are needy little bastards whose first language is Whine. It didn't matter about the fresh food I gave them, the movies I sat through or the games of beer pong I deliberately lost – the Jan Miner character was determined to be grumpy and confrontational, and Jan Scientist was constantly punchably irritating. Whenever I thought I was triumphing at managing the base – helped by a system that allows you to set up automatic production of important things like radiation filters to keep you safe, and allotting different clones to regularly do specific shifts – I would have to drop what I was doing and run around doing something else for my dependants to keep them happy. You see where I am going with this? Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion The Alters may be pitched as a sci-fi survival game, but really? It's a parenting sim. The very last thing I want to do with my free time. My failures in the game (and there are many) are accompanied by me screaming at the needy sods to give me a break for five minutes. My neighbours probably still think my kids are still at home. I have never felt so strongly that I am the wrong person to play a game that is so right. The script and story are strong, almost like an interactive version of Andy Weir's The Martian. Philosophical concepts are bandied around, such as Camus's idea that heroism is easy, and it's doing the normal things that is the real challenge in life. And the graphics are so distinctive and mesmerising they are works of art. The space base moves around like a futuristic take on Howl's Moving Castle. The game questions the very meaning of existence and what we're supposed to do with it, and it is moving to witness the clones react to their new reality. Some hate you, others are fascinated, but all at points bond with you over shared memories of everything from Mom's pierogies and beloved lava lamps to how you dealt with your abusive father. There is imagination and intelligence in abundance. It would make an incredible novel or animated movie. And 1990s Dominik, who had no kids or responsibilities, would have found marshalling a load of interesting, talented but whiny dependants a fun novelty. It's like The Game of Life, which was a fun board game to play as kids, but hell when we had two in the back seat of our car. Maybe The Alters is the perfect game for you to play if you are thinking about having kids. In fact I urge anyone of child-bearing or rearing age to play it immediately, to see if you are up to the task in real life or if, like me, it all turns out to be too much hard work.
The Star
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
Finding yourselves in a gloriously stressful sci-fi adventure
What are the events that made you who you are? Do you fixate on the contingencies, or the ostensible hand of fate that drove you to this particular place in space-time? How do you make sense of your regrets, your self-justifications, your burdens, your excuses? The Alters is a game about a man physically confronted with such questions. To survive on a remote planet, he must learn to live with the other selves he might have been, radically different incarnations who share Jan Dolski's exact DNA but have their own personalities and talents. After beginning in a cliche fashion, the latest effort by 11 Bit Studios, the Polish developer behind Frostpunk and This War Of Mine , blossoms into an extraordinary survival game that explores miscommunication, human fallibility and conflicting motivations. At the start, Jan finds himself the sole survivor of a space mining expedition on the behalf of Ally Corp. Soon after exiting his lifepod, he discovers a deposit of 'rapidium', the most valuable substance in the universe yet one whose properties are scarcely understood. Then, upon returning to his ship, Jan learns he is in imminent danger: The radiance of a too-close star will soon char him into ash. Heeding the instructions from a colleague on Earth, Jan also discovers the most personal information imaginable on the ship's quantum computer: a form of searchable memories that chart all the pivotal decisions that led him to enlist in Ally Corp's space mission. Rushed for time but lacking the technical know-how to get his ship moving, Jan initiates a branching procedure on the computer that allows him to select an alternative life path. Using the rapidium, which is known to hasten organic growth, he births another self in the ship's medical wing, known as 'the womb'. But Jan Dolski, the technician, is far from enthusiastic when he realises what's going on. He resents Jan Dolski, the builder. For his life choices. For using him as a means to an end. To escape the fatal starlight, Jan must gather resources that can be converted into food, fuel and building materials. Doing so entails exploring the outside terrain for resource deposits, then setting up mining stations and powering them via pylons to the ship. The environmental design is excellent, and wiring up a far-flung deposit can feel as satisfying as taking down a nemesis in another game. But there is only so much that can be crammed into a space day. You have to be ruthlessly efficient, lest you find yourself, as I did at various points, having to backtrack several days to get things on track. Fair warning: The Alters will let you fall on your face. By contrast with so many games that urge perfectionism – high scores, low times, no-hit runs, etc – it wants you to embrace your errors and remember that out of mistakes, good things can happen. 'What was really important for us was to create the life of Jan Dolski from our own experiences and our own loaded questions,' the game's director, Tomasz Kisilewicz, told me. Early in the game's five-year development cycle at 11 Bit Studios, the developers were polled internally about the what-ifs that have haunted them. 'For one person, it's 'What if I never left my hometown?' For somebody else, 'What if I took this business opportunity or didn't drop out of college?'' Kisilewicz said. The most emotional ones, he said, were about relationships. ''What if I proposed?'' By the third act, I had created four other alters to assist Jan: a biologist, a scientist, a refinery operator and a miner. (Other options include a doctor, guard, worker and shrink.) Aside from the refiner – a laid-back, wellness-oriented guy – the others are prickly in their own way. Try as I might, I couldn't help but court their animosity when I irked them with my conversational choices or decisions. The feelings of tension were mutual. Oh, how I shuddered inside whenever I heard some variation of 'Jan, got a moment?' while immersed in some time-sensitive task. Rarely has a game filled my head with duties that felt so pressing. At almost any given moment, there is something to fret over: Is there enough inventory space? Are there enough resources to build? Is the ship adequately protected against radiation? Is there enough food? Are there enough repair kits to fix things on the ship? During our conversation, I told Kisilewicz that I was especially impressed with the adversaries Jan encounters that aren't hostile-minded aliens. There are spatial anomalies that float in the air like astral jellyfish, irradiating Jan if he comes into contact – or, in their most fearsome form, causing time to speed up if he remains in their vicinity. Kisilewicz explained that those who worked on The Alters refrained from trying to devise large-scale combat scenarios for practical reasons: the game had a small development team. They also didn't want to detract from the personal story they wanted to tell. Along with CD Projekt Red, the makers of The Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 , 11 Bit Studios has helped catapult Poland into the vanguard of the gaming industry. Kisilewicz was clear-minded about the country's particular cultural influence on The Alters. 'It brings this Polish flavour of touching tough things and not shying away from bad endings, from bad outcomes,' he said. The Alters is a first-class resource management game that I found rewardingly stressful to play. This is not a game where the good, bad and neutral conversation options are signposted. Some alters may react negatively to a gesture of empathy or curiosity. Sometimes there aren't any good choices. Jan's journey is marked by pressing ethical concerns. They invite players to reflect on their own priorities, and to ponder what we owe others and what we owe ourselves. – ©2025 The New York Times Company (The Alters was reviewed on the PlayStation 5. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.) This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Finding Yourselves in a Gloriously Stressful Sci-Fi Adventure
What are the events that made you who you are? Do you fixate on the contingencies, or the ostensible hand of fate that drove you to this particular place in space-time? How do you make sense of your regrets, your self-justifications, your burdens, your excuses? The Alters is a game about a man physically confronted with such questions. To survive on a remote planet, he must learn to live with the other selves he might have been, radically different incarnations who share Jan Dolski's exact DNA but have their own personalities and talents. After beginning in a cliché fashion, the latest effort by 11 Bit Studios, the Polish developer behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine, blossoms into an extraordinary survival game that explores miscommunication, human fallibility and conflicting motivations. At the start, Jan finds himself the sole survivor of a space mining expedition on the behalf of Ally Corp. Soon after exiting his lifepod, he discovers a deposit of 'rapidium,' the most valuable substance in the universe yet one whose properties are scarcely understood. Then, upon returning to his ship, Jan learns he is in imminent danger: The radiance of a too-close star will soon char him into ash. Heeding the instructions from a colleague on Earth, Jan also discovers the most personal information imaginable on the ship's quantum computer: a form of searchable memories that chart all the pivotal decisions that led him to enlist in Ally Corp's space mission. Rushed for time but lacking the technical know-how to get his ship moving, Jan initiates a branching procedure on the computer that allows him to select an alternative life path. Using the rapidium, which is known to hasten organic growth, he births another self in the ship's medical wing, known as 'the womb.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Metro
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
The Alters review - send in the clones
From the makers of This War Of Mine and Frostpunk comes a new sci-fi survival game, where you literally are your own worst enemy. Now that we've finally finished our Nintendo Switch 2 launch coverage, and the madness of not-E3 week is over, we have time to circle back and see what we might have missed from the beginning of the month. Normally, June isn't a busy time for new releases but for some reason this year was different and MindsEye proved to be such a baffling creation we were compelled to cover it as soon as possible. The Alters wasn't any more sensible in picking its release date, especially with the summer games drought now upon us, but it is a vastly superior experience. Technically, it's a survival game, but rather than a formless sandbox world to explore it has a tight narrative, very much in the vein of films such as Mickey 17, Moon, and Multiplicity (except that it doesn't begin with the letter M). The idea of a single person being cloned multiple times, to perform different or dangerous tasks is surprisingly common in movies (which is a little strange as companies would surely prefer to just use multiple, low paid workers) but relatively rare in games, as anything other than a throwaway excuse for getting an extra life. With The Alters though, the concept takes centre stage. Frostpunk and This War Of Mine would have been fine games in their own right but Polish developer 11 bit studios elevated them by using the gameplay to explore morality and the human condition. By constantly forcing you to choose between the lesser of two (or more) evils, you gained an often disturbing insight into how the real world works and how immoral or destructive acts can initially be driven by good intentions. In The Alters, you play as engineer Jan Dolski, an unremarkable everyman who finds himself stranded on alien planet, whose sun emits deadly radiation if you're caught out in the open when it rises above the horizon. This creates a tight time limit for the whole game but luckily you have access to a mobile base, which is presented like the bases from XCOM, with a side-on view where you can see everyone working away, like a sci-fi ant colony. The base is built inside a giant wheel, but there's no one except you to operate it, which is where the cloning comes in. Not only do you need more people to staff the base, but you also need to go outside and forage for resources, in order to craft tools and equipment, and grow food. The most precious commodity is something called rapidium, which has the ability to accelerate cell growth in any living thing. This is used for food but, just as importantly, to create clones – or alters as the game calls them. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Most alters can do most ordinary jobs but sometimes you need specialists, like a scientist, to work on something more specific. This may seem impossible, given the original Jan is just an ordinary engineer, but the conceit is that the central computer has all his memories stored and it's able to extrapolate from there different paths his life could've taken, in order to get alters with different abilities. We're not sure that makes much sense but it's why we mentioned Multiplicity, even though it's a comedy and not sent in space. In that film, Michael Keaton plays innumerable different clones, with very different personalities, and, in a rather less slapstick manner, that's how The Alters works too. The narrative is fascinating, in that the thing the alters are most interested in, is how and why your life didn't go down the path that would've led to them. They don't necessarily trust you or your decisions and they're fully aware that they're disposable and that while you might make it home okay, if everything works out, they're just as likely to be discarded or sacrificed. As a result, you're not just managing them in terms of telling them what to do but dealing with their personal concerns as well – which despite decades of strategy management games is not something any of them have ever really got into. You can't refer them to HR, so instead you have to tell them what you think will best motivate them and then make the decision as to whether you outright lie or not. There's a tendency for the script to rely on a single, cliched personality type for each alter, such as the nerdy scientist, but while some of the plot points, such as neglecting home life in favour of work, are equally predictable the alters do change over time, as a result of your input and their interactions with each other. Dealing with alters is when the game is at its best but some of the other elements don't work quite so well. Every major task takes time to complete and that means that sometimes you're not doing anything more than pressing a button and waiting for the day to end – although you could argue that makes it even more realistic. Unfortunately, the survival aspect is also not very engaging, as it literally seems to be designed to waste time. The graphics are surprisingly good – the whole game looks far better than its mid-budget price tag suggests, but the day-to-day exploration and tedious minigames are a slog and quickly become repetitive. More Trending The increasingly dangerous aliens are also an irritation, as they're almost invisible and they have time compression abilities that, you guessed it, are also designed to steal precious days away from you. These aren't ruinous problems but interacting with the alters, and the quandaries they throw up, is much more interesting than the okay-ish survival elements. The game is inventive and ambitious, but it really needed a second pass in order to get everything working at the same level. We'd very much welcome a sequel but, ironically, The Alters would also work really well as a movie. In Short: A management game where you have to handle people as well as just spreadsheets, but while its sci-fi elements add intrigue the survival gameplay isn't all it could be. Pros: A fantastic idea that attempts a clever mixture of narrative, management, and survival gameplay, with some very difficult moral decisions to make. Surprisingly good graphics. Cons: The survival gameplay is repetitive and rarely very interesting. Pacing can be knocked off course at times and some of the writing is a little basic. Score: 7/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £28.99*Publisher: 11 bit studiosDeveloper: 11 bit studiosRelease Date: 13th June 2025 Age Rating: 16 *available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from day one Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The best Mario Kart World character is not who you'd expect MORE: Xbox to be hit by fourth wave of layoffs in 18 months says report MORE: Switch 2 has a secret feature that's perfect for an overlooked genre
