Imagine incorporating all the dreary aspects of your game, thinking that maybe pushing your players close to the brink tests their mental capacity to make the best out of their situation. Often times making certain choices that leaves a butterfly effect.
Being an intrepid astronaut with clones is certainly this year's favorite trend to pick on. The Alters isn't super deeply philosophical, nor is it nail-biting social commentary. It's a difficult 20hr+ experience of grueling last minutes choices, surveying an unknown planet and finding about its greatest mysteries behind every difficult terrain. It's also a full on emotional rollercoaster.
- Keep on keeping up
There's a lot to stress out about. To start with, I have to farm enough Rapidium to go back home with. Meanwhile, the longer we stay, closer the sun gets before it incinerates everything on the surface. But that's not the worst part, yet.
Through Journey 2, there was just 5 of us and somehow the sheep that was cloned first to test the womb, have somehow passed away. The scientist after his autopsy confirmed that it's a brain disease, a complication of the Rapidium that is used, and somehow every one of us except me are affected. He was also at his wits end, so we took help from earth.
Morale was challenged so we had to keep our spirits up by watching movies, playing some beer pong, and then I managed to build a gym and several rooms that de-stressed them, as well as building a gym to keep ourselves fit. One of us went on a breakthrough first.
The miner got over his phantom pain, through some odd methods of using the Rapidium to regrow his limbs, technician gained trust with me and started to cooperate better. The botanist was the emotional one in the group, so I had to keep his interests aligned mostly on the inside of the station, while the scientist gets his research done, and us getting closer to our objectives.
None of this is easy, I sometimes contemplate how I got this far as Jan has to deal with 4 grown versions of himself, each a different personality, and their own struggles while having to live with each other, the magnetic storms don't help either.
We each had our ways of helping each other, but that illness was getting in closer and kept them in edge almost all the time. Contacting someone like Maxwell, who wanted to toy with nature, proposed a twisted idea of using a clone that acts as a "Tabula Rasa" to donate brain tissue to us. This guy had way too many crazy ideas, so I was hesitant at first.
Time went by, and I finally got to Lena, who suggested an alternative by inserting a chip that modulated the illness. Unfortunately, it also tracked them. I'm putting myself on the limp, excavating the hard terrain that needs so much equipment to get through for both mining, killing anomalies and finding Planetary Samples. End of Journey 2, miner and technician rebelled.
- Finding common ground
So I was at the end of the road, Journey 3 was us lost because some of our storage was taken by the other two. They used a beaten down cruiser car to get around places, it wasn't until we all found a safe spot. I also went through some kind of character growth from the Womb too.
Giving me certain dialogue options thanks to my newfound perspective, and confidence, allowing Jan to finally go through almost anything. The scientist managed to research as many as he can, though it seems clear I lacked samples to unlock others. Good news, found the other guys, bad news, they're not budging until I found the solution to the implant.
It's here we grew, we understood more. Also, two more members are added, the doctor and refiner. Despite the overwhelming odds, the strength we gained was through my willingness to help each other work through our issues. Which effectively helped our productivity, eventually Lena figured our solution to the tracking thing, and eventually we all got together.
Funny enough, I still managed to run the entire thing with my 4 crewmembers. Having 6 of them propelled us to increase production, and get all that Rapidium. But, there were two problems. We had to get out, so calling for the shuttle to save us wasn't possible because of a prismatic barrier. Another being that, the CEO of the company from earth might have sent a military squad.
Of course, we've reached another two conundrum, but putting everything we all had learned, we finally built a device that creates through the plane of reality for the barrier, but this messed up physics so hard, our ship was taking super radiation damage. All hands on deck, and me planting the Fragmenting Device, it was broken through.
As for the squad, after some discussion and planning, we had a Rapidium Arc with a false bottom built to safely hide my clones. Soon as their ship arrived, I planted the gas bomb, once we've reached earth, it crashed on a desert, and we ran. Freedom at last. This game was worth all my time.
Above screenshots and GIFs are from personal recordings only
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