Choose life

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / 11 Bit Studios

11 Bit Studios’ sci-fi management game The Alters arrived at a point when I was unhappy with the trajectory my life was taking. But, I wasn’t expecting a story about a shipwrecked astronaut and his cabal of clones to leave me questioning not just the choices I’d taken that led me down that path, but also highlighting all the choices I had left untaken along the way.

That’s not bad going for a game in which you spend most evenings getting hammered playing beer pong.

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I see The Alters firmly in the context of what was going on in my life at the point it came out. Prior to joining RPS, I had taken a step out of videogames journalism. While I continued to dip my toe in with freelance, my bread and butter was financial copywriting. For years I’d wondered if I had fallen into writing about games because it had been the door that opened when I went knocking at age 20 and not because it was the thing I actively chose.

It’s fascinating to talk to developers about the projects to which they’ve chosen to devote years of their lives. And, likewise, it’s special to speak with players who have committed themselves to games long after release. But, games journalism is still a job and one that, as proven by the 24-hour Game Awards coverage last week, can be all-consuming. Financial copywriting, and jobs like it, had always sat on the periphery, glimmering away as a nine-to-five option. An elusive dream of a steady income from writing, without having to work all hours. So, in 2024, I made the choice to see what that other life would have been like.

And, boy, did I hate it.

I really struggled working on something I didn’t care about and that readers didn’t seem to care about, either. It was a job in which I was counting down the hours every day. And it’s reflected in the games I was playing. My Steam stats show I poured hours into idle clickers that I could run on my personal laptop while I was writing articles about interest rates on my work machine. I’m drawn to these games when I’m feeling particularly unproductive, because they give me a taste of ticking off tasks, even if that task is baking a billion cookies a second in Cookie Clicker.

Then, eight months into my life as a financial copywriter, 11 Bit Studios released The Alters. Ostensibly a sci-fi management game that sees you leading a crew of shipwrecked astronauts as they try to gather the resources they need to escape an alien world and return home, in reality it’s an exploration of an unlived life.

Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

You initially play as Jan, the sole survivor of the crash on the alien world. But escaping from the planet is more than a one-person job. Luckily you have access to a cloning bay capable of creating new Jans. They aren’t straight copies of your current Jan, however: they’re versions of him that took different paths in life. There’s the Jan who became an uncompromising scientist, who you can put to work in your vessel’s laboratory; the Jan who became a miner, and can better operate the drill equipment you use to collect resources; or the Jan who became a union activist and has a natural home in the ship’s workshop.

If you’ve played 11 Bit Studios’ This War Of Mine, you will be familiar with The Alter’s gameplay. There are always more jobs to be done than you have people to do them and you must try and keep your crew happy by not only not overworking them, but also finding specific activities and gifts that cater to their tastes. I was drawn in by the management game, but I was gripped by its story of someone grappling with the current circumstances of their life and recognising the choices they had made – both choices of action and inaction – that led them there.

The different Jans all ended up on their path because they indulged different impulses. The Jan who became a scientist, abandoned a fledgling relationship and turned down a well-paying job to focus on intellectually satisfying work. The Jan who became a miner never went to university, instead taking work at the mine to pay for his mother’s care. The Jan who joined the unions, did so after he saw authorities violently put down strikers looking for better conditions. Each Jan both becomes a radically different person because of the path they took and can justify the choices that took them there.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that on my first playthrough I was making choices I thought would have the best ending. I took a very min/max approach, choosing what I believed would make for the largest number of (living) and happy Jans. This utilitarian approach took me to an ending I found profoundly uncomfortable. Similar to when Disco Elysium calls you a coward for making political choices that forever keep you on the fence, The Alters shows you that making a choice you believe in, whatever it may be is better than trying to coast through life without causing any pain for those around you.

I’m not going to say it was The Alters that convinced me to apply for other jobs, I had been sending my CV out to roles for months already at that point. But it was cathartic to engage with this story of choice and consequence. And, while I think I would have enjoyed it at any stage in my life, I don’t know if it would have resonated with me as strongly as it did at that moment.