Last year, The Alters emerged as one of the most interesting new titles from 11 Bit Studios, the makers of Frostpunk. I very much enjoyed its unique and innovative mixture of story, exploration, base-management and resource gathering, with no other game quite scratching the same itch. Being a predominantly story-centric game, after you’d finished the main campaign there wasn’t a whole lot more to experience other than to replay it. Now a year later we have the first major piece of DLC, Last Variable, adding its own new standalone campaign experience with a whole new story.
Last Variable picks up from one of the endings of the main game, where Scientist Jan elected to remain on the planet in order to continue his research into the Oasis, an area of intense natural life on the otherwise arid planet which somehow is able to survive the incredibly harsh solar radiation of the sun during the periods in which it is exposed to sunlight (the planet being in a trinary star system and having differing obits around two dimmer stars and a much brighter one). You play as the 2nd generation of Scientist Jan, the original of whom passes away from old age at the start, after having spent his life being unable to discover the secrets of the Oasis, given the cold phase when the surface is inhabitable lasts only 2 weeks and the hot phase lasts a whole 13 years.
Scientist Jan now has a new base located underground, making it feel even more directly like XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s base than it did with the moving hamster wheel one from the main game. After you manage to construct the cyrosleep chamber, it’s possible to wait out the hot phases in safety and suspended animation, and use the time more wisely than 1st generation Scientist Jan did. Your main objective is still to understand the Oasis and how it works, and to that end you’ll also need the assistance of your own Alters. A reminder that Alters are clones of someone who have implanted memories of making different life choices to the original person in order to create an “alternative universe” copy of themselves, without actually being from an alternate universe. Since all of these originate from Scientist Jan, this time they’re all specific variations of scientist: a physicist, a chemist and so on.
As before, you’ll need to split your time between gathering resources on the surface, building and expanding your underground base, managing your Alters and keeping them occupied on different tasks, and ultimately continuing your research into the Oasis. There are usually half a dozen different tasks which need completing and prioritizing the most vital task is key to keeping everyone fed, healthy and satisfied. Different materials still need different infrastructure to collect them, and the environment is peppered with various anomalies which will sap your suit power or irradiate you if you enter them. You’ll need to construct different pipes and connectors in order to build a network of resource gathering, which can get quite complicated as you expand outward across the large map.
A new ability Last Variable introduces is the ability to terraform different areas of the map, effectively expanding the reach of the Oasis to a wider zone. Doing this will allow you to take more research samples and unlock more research projects, unlocking more items within the tech tree to simplify tasks or create new base rooms or bits of equipment. Broadly speaking, the DLC is a lot less stressful than the main game. In the main campaign, each section of the game is on a ticking clock, as if the mobile base is unable to move by the time the sun comes up, everyone will burn to death. In Last Variable, the cryosleep chamber means you can safely sleep out the hot phases and wake up 13 years later like no time has passed.
You can however sometimes choose to not send all your Alters to cryosleep and if there’s important research which needs to be done during a hot phase, so they will instead need to live it out in real time in a field lab, meaning a major age difference will emerge between you and anyone who had to live out a hot phase the long way round. This can result in interesting conversations with your older Alters who have had to endure long periods of isolation, although the near insurrections which could happen in the base game from unhappy colleagues aren’t going to be occurring this time.
Last Variable is a chunky DLC squarely aimed at people who enjoyed and finished the base game, since it expects you to have previously played and be familiar with all the core concepts at the start, as well as the prior storyline. The new story is just as interesting and well written as before, and all the new Alters are great characters in their own right with Alex Jordan continuing to put in a masterclass in terms of variation of voice acting between the different Jans. Last Variable doesn’t reinvent the main game’s special formula, but it adds plenty of new content to see and explore.
