Frostpunk dev’s quietly very cool survival game where you manage relationships with your alt-universe selves gets delayed to next year

When I played The Alters at the same preview event where I also tried to establish turbo-communism in Frostpunk 2 earlier this year (it could have worked), I came away very much surprised. Games that pitch themselves as survival-anything don’t tend to do much for me; I struggle enough to survive in real life.

But The Alters—kind of Subnautica plus Midnight Suns except instead of Wolverine and Blade you’re juggling your relationships with several clones of a working class Polish guy—actually hooked me. It’s based around cloning what are, essentially, alternative-universe versions of yourself: The one where you became a scientist to help you research tech, the one where you became a miner to help you gather resources, and they all have their own weird stories. In this lifetime you stayed with your wife, in this one you went to university, in this one you stood up to your abusive dad, and so on.