How the developer of Frostpunk is exploring new worlds – and alternate timelines
Game The Alters
Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios
Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series
Release 2024
All of us, at some point in our lives, have surely wondered: what if everything had gone differently for us? The Alters’ game director, Tomasz Kisilewicz, certainly has. “‘I could be richer, happier, healthier if I took that opportunity, or if I didn’t split with my girlfriend, or if I stayed in my hometown and worked in the family business with my father,’” he says by way of example. “The questions and points of life are different for everyone, but we all have this tendency to think, ‘I would probably be better off’. But the truth is, it wouldn’t necessarily be better or worse – it would just be different.”
It’s hard to imagine, though, how things could be anything but better for Jan Dolski, the game’s lead character. All his decisions have led him here: to a mining vessel, crash-landed onto a desolate planet, close enough to its system’s star that sunrise will be fatal. Woken unexpectedly from cryo-sleep, he finds that he’s the only surviving member of his crew, left all alone on this planet. For a little while, at least.
Jan soon discovers a way to grow clone bodies, versions of himself that can help man the base and help him dodge the sunrise. But these ‘alters’ are not exact copies – each one is implanted with memories and a personality from other possible timelines. In other words, Jan Dolski no longer needs to wonder ‘what if’: the answer is looking him right in the eye.
“The Miner is a version of Jan who never left their hometown, who stayed to become a miner, just like his father,” Kisilewicz says, gesturing towards a man on the screen. He has the same face as our Jan – he’s got those same piercing eyes – but wears his hair shorter, with a close-cropped beard, and a telltale scar above his left eye. This version of Jan had an accident while working in the mines, Kisilewicz explains. “And that led to him losing his arm. But right now, his consciousness is in a direct copy of main-Jan’s body.”
From the Miner’s perspective, he has been reborn into a new reality with an arm that doesn’t feel like his own, leaving him with a kind of reverse phantom-limb pain. Or, as he more succinctly puts it, “I feel like shit”. The Miner is asking our Jan – who has become captain of the ship through, essentially, eldest-sibling rules – for painkillers. Which seems a reasonable request, until Kisilewicz cuts in with one important little detail about his life: “The Miner has a history of abusing opioids, connected with losing his arm.”
So: this man is in pain, he says he can’t work without drugs, and
