How The Alters Makes You Care About Dialogue Choices

The Alters is a distinct blend of management sim, city-builder, and narrative-heavy RPG, making it quite a unique gaming experience indeed. 11 Bit Studios managed to cram The Alters full of engaging survival and social sim elements, which combine to provide a truly novel narrative adventure, one wherein players are in the driver’s seat, for better and for worse.

But of course, The Alters is far from the first game to promise its players control over its story—in some ways, player agency has been at the center of video game storytelling since its inception, as interactivity is unique to the medium. That said, most games simply offer the illusion of control, giving players false options that all lead to the same outcome, barring one or two pivotal moments, depending on the game. This is especially true when it comes to dialogue options, which have more or less become ubiquitous in adventure games. Indeed, player-chosen dialogue is the most common way that games trick audiences into thinking that they have power over the narrative, but The Alters actually lives up to this promise.

The Alters: How Jan Miner Becomes a Crash Course in Player Choice

Jan Miner is one of the most interesting characters in The Alters, and his story is the first real introduction to the game’s choice system.

The Alters’ Dialogue Is Impactful, Engaging, and Rewards Thoughtfulness

Survival Sim Elements Make Dialogue Choice Actually Matter in The Alters

The first crucial piece of The Alters‘ dialogue puzzle is a robust system of interlocked consequences: slipping up every now and then during conversations won’t cost a player an entire run, but consistent errors, especially when in conjunction with other adverse conditions like a lack of food or long work hours, can cause Alters’ moods to plummet. This can lead to reduced productivity and even Alter Rebellion events, which can put a major strain on resources. Put another way, bad dialogue choices can be part of a domino effect, ultimately leading to a player’s downfall.

This is quite different from how dialogue options generally function in games. Most of the time, such options are simply there as seasoning, as it were: they provide players with a feeling of agency in a given exchange, and it may even evoke some unique NPC dialogue at times, but the narrative outcome is typically fixed. This is not so in The Alters, whose survival-management mechanics directly tie into both the narrative and the dialogue via Alter mood states. This makes dialogue choices both dynamic and unpredictable, leading to consistent negative and positive outcomes that impact gameplay. This is a far cry from even rock-solid choice-based RPGs like Mass Effect, whose dialogue choices only alter specific, predetermined story beats, if they do anything at all.

The Alters’ Dialogue Rewards Research and Close Attention

Each time a player makes an Alter in The Alters, they can scrub through their respective life histories, measuring them against the choices that Jan Dolski, the player character, made in his life. This is an interesting feature in its own right, but the way that it factors into dialogue, and the broader gameplay loop by extension, is what makes it truly special from a design perspective.

Players can delve into the trauma, achievements, and miscellaneous highs and lows of each Alter by reading about them in the Quantum Computer, and this grants invaluable insight into their personalities and values. For instance, after learning about Jan Miner’s struggles with self-esteem due to the loss of his arm, players might be more likely to select dialogue that reinforces Miner’s sense of self-worth. What’s nice is that The Alters doesn’t simply have Jan Dolski know this information and leverage it automatically: players have a chance to say the “wrong” thing even after reading about each Alter’s history, which lends gravity and depth to every conversation.