The Alters

So much great stuff has been written about this game; I was really excited to try it out. And I enjoyed it at the beginning, but honestly, it became sort of tedious after a while. First of all, the game seems to be beset with bugs, or at least it has seemed that way on my console. The system abruptly crashed multiple times during Act 2, forcing me to replay from my last save, which sometimes is quite a way back. Like all survival games, there is a certain amount of "busy work" you have to do to in The Alters to build out your base, accumulate resources, and so on, and while those of us who play these kinds of games (and I've played several) understand that and even derive a sense of accomplishment from that process, it's a huge bummer to have the game suddenly crash on you and cause you to lose your last half hour (or whatever) of progress and have to do it all over again. And this happened to me maybe a half dozen times. It's demoralizing. Then, on top of that, the game eventually puts you in a series of no-win situations. A point comes at about 40-45 in-game days into your campaign where you are essentially forced to choose between doing something horrible and doing something even more horrible. Everybody basically starts to hate you and blame you for, basically, doing things the game forced you to do. It becomes extremely unpleasant, especially when coupled with the multiple crashes I mentioned above. I recognize that this game has potential to be great, and that it has important things to say about technology and ethics and how the choices in your life shape you as a person. And sure, part of the experience of a game like this is to force you to make difficult decisions and live with their consequences. But as this game progressed, I felt less and less like I was being asked to think about Important Philosophical Questions and more like the game was trying to make me feel like a bad person and not even giving me dialog options to defend myself. It just stopped being fun and intellectually interesting to me and started to become a chore and a giant bummer. I may come back to this at some point, maybe when my IRL life becomes a little less stressful, but right now, I need to put this down, because it has stopped being fun, and instead of being fun, it’s just adding to the stress in my life. Sorry, 11 Bit, I know you're a quality studio, and intellectually I can even appreciate that this is a unique and special experience. But in the end, this game stopped feeling like a game, and started feeling like an obligation. And I have enough of those…

You may run into an unaddressed bug that stops you from being able to save around mid way in the game. A recommended fix to restore an old load file from the beginning and address a side mission did not work. I replayed the same part of the game twice and still can't advance. Poor quality.