The Alters has changed the way I play games for the better, and after 18 years I can finally finish Mass Effect

If I'd looked into The Alters when the opportunity to review it landed in my inbox, I wouldn't have taken it on. I assumed it was a much shorter game than it was. Luckily, it's the best game I've reviewed all year, with an inventive and introspective sci-fi story. But that's not why passing it by would have been a blunder. It's because the lesson it taught me has completely changed the way I play video games.

Who among us can hold their hand on their heart and say, honestly, that they've never reloaded a save file because something didn't go their way? Never retried an unsuccessful pickpocket in Skyrim. Never reverted to an older save when a guard spotted them in Dishonored, or they lost a battle in Total War. I know I certainly can't.

I don't have anything against save-scumming, as the practice is known. I do it myself, and if the developers wanted to stop it, they'd just make our save files inaccessible to us like XCOM 2's Ironman mode does. It's useful for correcting mistakes or completing challenge runs, but for me, my need for every single encounter to go perfectly was ruining the way I played a lot of games.

No such thing as a perfect run

Often, when I'm gaming, I'm telling a little story in my head alongside whatever main narrative in front of me is occurring. I do this mostly in Skyrim, where I'm enjoying my millionth playthrough as a stealth archer restoring the Thieves Guild to its former glory. I just turn my own inner monologue into that of my character's and live out another life.

This isn't much of an issue when I'm playing an old game I've already completed and I'm actively attempting for a specific playthrough, but it utterly immobilizes me when I'm trying a game out for the first time – especially lengthy RPGs.

I find myself so concerned with seeing and doing everything in one playthrough, getting that perfect run, that I completely ruin the experience for myself. I look up every single conversation outcome when I talk to someone, read a guide on all the notable loot in an area, and check all the different ways to complete a quest – the outcomes, rewards, and consequences further down the line. It's exhausting, and it means I rarely finish RPGs, because I spend hours reading up on them instead of actually playing. Well, no more.

Spoilers ahead for the final act of The Alters.

In The Alters, you're forced to make tough choices. If you've played 11 Bit Studios' other games like This War of Mine or Frostpunk, you'll be familiar. You play as Jan Dolski, a builder on a deep space mission who gets stranded alone on a faraway planet in a chaotic three-sun orbit. The Three Body Problem has prepared me for this; there's no way to survive, you just have to get off the planet.

To do so, you make clones of yourself with different skills that arise due to the unique choices they made in their simulated lives. It's all very sci-fi, don't worry about it. The point is, in act two, you make a decision that's going to emotionally devastate half of your crew. There's no way around it; there's no clean option. You just have to make your choice and power through.

Jan and the crew wrestle with the fallout for the rest of the game, and in a moment of quantum computer-generated introspection, Jan comes face to face with himself – literally. He teaches himself to stop dwelling on his past slip-ups or considering the ways he could have avoided them. We're all going to make mistakes; it's inevitable. Instead, we can stop thinking of them as mistakes and start regarding things more agnostically.

Rather than consequences, we have outcomes. And sure, the outcome you get may not be the one you planned and hoped for, but this is where you're at now. What we need to do is learn how to live with ourselves after making a choice. It was a deeply touching, freeing message for me.

The decision that made half my alters leave me was one I made out of love. Instead of installing brain chips that would give a company remote control of them, I grew a human body that was supposed to not have a consciousness. Turns out it did, but even though the other alters didn't know that, they still couldn't reckon with the basis of what I'd done and left instead.

Rather than reloading an old save – something The Alters only lets you do from the main menu to discourage this sort of behavior – I decided to put this new lesson into action. Instead of trying to persuade the rebels to rejoin me, I respected their choice and my own, and helped them gather the resources they'd need to survive the upcoming sunrise. I don't know if they did survive, but I made my choice, and they made theirs.

With this new perspective fresh in my mind and heart, I'm now trying to get into Mass Effect for the third time, and it's going better than ever before. Instead of making sure I complete every side quest before moving onto the next main mission, I'm going with the flow, letting the Mass Relays send me wherever makes the most sense given the story. If I miss out on something, it's no big deal; I can just do another playthrough in the future if I have fun. And I am having fun, finally.

Testing the theory

There's already a lot of reading to do in Mass Effect. Between the codex and all the conversations Shepard has with the crew of the Normandy, there must be at least a full book's worth of words. I wasn't doing myself any favors on my previous two attempts, combing through guides every five minutes to make sure I didn't leave a single stone unturned.

Will I still look up a guide if I'm stuck? Sure. I still want to finish the game. I'm just not going to ruin the spirit of things by becoming an encyclopedia of every branching dialogue option and squad composition before I hit level two.

I'll admit, I do still wince a bit when Shepard says something completely different from what the conversation wheel shows. I'll always prefer Fallout 3's fully written out dialogue to this, but I'm not reloading when Shepard's tone isn't what I intended it to be, and that's progress right there. Instead, my story will be whatever it is, and then I'll finally move on to Mass Effect 2. And after that, the galaxy is my oyster.

This is actually a lesson my former flatmate tried to teach me a few years ago. No matter the game he's playing, he just goes through it once, and whatever happens is his story. He enjoys the fact that his experience is his own, unique to him, tailored to the choices he made. I should have listened to him, but then I wouldn't be writing this article and sharing the message with you. See? Before I'd played The Alters, I would have thought heeding his advice was a mistake, but taking it to heart for the first time led me to this moment, and I can't wait to discover all the moments that still await me.

Thank god I didn't research The Alters before saying yes to that review.

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