The Alters review
11 Bit Studios have a thing for circles. Their 2018 hit Frostpunk had you plant rings of buildings around a massive coal-fired generator in a frozen crater, picking research paths to steer your fully overlapping class/temperature Venn diagram of a city toward either fascism or theocracy. Frostpunk's radial design is hypnotic, putting across the theme of humanity versus the engulfing cold with claustrophobic symmetry, and 11-bit's later colony sims have struggled to either evolve the motif or depart from it. Frostpunk 2, for instance, shatters and smooshes the circle to form a district-based frostland republic that gets lost in its own chatter.
The Alters is weirder than Frostpunk 2, and more successful. It tips the circle on one side. The crater city is now a wheel-shaped spacebase, strung with modular dwellings, which trundles across a landscape you will also explore on foot. It's one genre, the colony management sim, bowled through another, the third-person action-adventure. The game also develops Frostpunk's urban faction dynamics into a more intimate, tortured blend of psychological allegory and workplace soap opera, with the quirk that every member of that workplace is technically one and the same guy.