Three Kids in a Trench Coat

Lately, there have been some fantastic video games that spoke to aspects of my inner world, and that each evoked aspects of inner worlds in some really fantastic & vibrant ways.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be exploring resonant themes explored in a few of them. Themes like: alters craving independence & recognition as individuals in society; are parts masks or what’s behind the mask?; what do little/younger parts hear inside when we talk; and what happens when the host of an inner world wants to pull the plug while there are still others inside?

The three games I’ll talk about are The Alters, A Shady Part of Me, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

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Um… what *is* an inner world, anyway?

The ‘inner world’, in DID terms, is used to refer to a shared mental space where parts/alters can co-exist, communicate, have safe spaces, and live when not ‘at the front’. For example, mine is a huge woodland grove, filled with clearings, cabins, camps, rivers, a soaring peak, and at the centre, the Heartfire, where everyone can gather and hang out / discuss system issues & important decisions, that sort of thing. Everyone has their own place here, and the people they like to be closest to. The littles have a safe space (the Funderdome…), and there’s a bench on a little island in the middle of a lake for anyone who just needs some space.

It’s cool. We made it ourselves, and we love it. Also, I can look in and see where everyone’s at and what they’re up to when doing things like system roll-call as a way of checking-in.

Inner world visualisation techniques are commonly used therapeutically in DID, for the reasons above. They also seem to come pretty intuitively to many people who dissociate, and trance states inherent in dissociation make them particularly effective.^{1, 2}

No two systems are alike, and no two inner worlds the same – and video games offer a chance to explore so much about what it’s like to have these places where parts of yourself can be together & interact.

So, let’s start with…

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The Alters

The Alters is a third-person action survival & base building game released earlier this year on PC, Xbox, and PS5.

You are Jan Dolski, a lone survivor of a space mission who crashes on a hostile planet where the sun’s lethal radiation forces him to live on a giant, mobile base, trying to outrun the sunrise.

To survive, Jan uses a special material called Rapidium to create “Alters” – alternate versions of himself with different skills and life paths, with their own relationships with him… and each other. The premise of cloned versions of a person – but whose identities branched off at various points in your life – is a really interesting way of approaching the idea of ‘multiple selves’.

Jan & his rag-tag crew of Alters explore the planet, build up their base, have some major tiffs (and wild boy’s nights…), and race against the sun to rendezvous with an incoming rescue team… who believe you’re the only survivor down here. Yeah, about that…

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Sounds a bit DID-y to me…

That’s because the Alter creation process, the Alters as characters, and some of the story beats, were written with DID as the main inspiration from the start. Here’s Game Director Tomasz Kisilewicz in an interview back in 2022, shortly after The Alters was announced:³

The psychological elements of the story.
The process of creating the alters is a purely fictional sci-fi concept, but the real-world medical cases of multiple personalities such as dissociative identity disorder served as an important point of reference on how to portray different personalities that are coming out of the same person. It is important that alters not only share the same body but also a large part of their life paths, and thus their personality. So we look at real-world multiple personality cases to best portray both the similarities and differences between them.

Yeah, when I looked up the development of the game after finishing it, none of this surprised me. It’s a really cool thing 11 Bit Studios have made here, and I highly recommend it.

So let’s take a look at some of the ways the game handles this “science-fiction is magic” depiction of multiplicity…

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The mining base as an ‘inner world’ representation

The space the game gives Jan & his Alters to co-exist in is really cool – elegant in its simplicity. It’s simply a side-on view of this huge, circular mobile base,…

Here’s what it looks like early on:

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This side-on base view, where you add new dorm rooms as new Alters emerge, and create spaces for them to be together & meet their needs, is great. Video games are a great source of inner world visualisation ideas – Multiplicity & Me talks about inner worlds using The Sims, here:

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If there’s something to discuss, Jan can gather everyone in the kitchen and talk things through. If you’re curious how that might go – another vid from Jess, where she hired some actors to illustrate what inner headspaces were like for her:

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Finding family inside & seeking independence

Jan & his Alters learn and grow together, live like a family, work as a team… but something that comes up time and again over the story is the idea of, “We know that if we make it back to earth we won’t be allowed to live our lives as people; we’ll have served our purpose and will be disposed of, or turned into science lab experiments.”

Fuck that.

Throughout the game, I was ride or die for my guys. I was not gonna let anyone mess with them, and I didn’t want special treatment for being, “the original”. You want us to manufacture some woodworking tools so you can carve a wooden duck, Jan Miner? You’ve got it, buddy! What’s that Jan Technician? You want me to use the Fabricator to make you a guitar, so we can have a rad love-in sing-along together? Oh I gotchu there, fam.

Right before the return trip to earth, Jan Botanist asked me to swap places with him, so he would be, “the” Jan Dolski. I accepted. I stowed away with my Alters, to go live with them. JB could deal with the press, the trial, our ex-wife… I wanted to go live on a beach, have sing-alongs, play beer pong, and watch terrible horror movies with our little family.

I imagine if he read all this, my therapist would probably sigh and go, “Yeah… that sounds like Riley alright” xD

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Deciding for the whole when you’re divided inside

In Act 2, you find out your alters are sick. Like, really sick. They’re all going to die of sci-fi brain cancer, as a result of their rapid growth with altered memories.

You’re presented with two options; grow a Tabula Rasa clone of yourself, a ‘blank Alter’ if you like… and harvest enough of their brain tissue to create a cure for the others – killing them in the process. Some of your Alters are horrified. I did not feel good about it. The idea of using the same process I’d just used to create my guys…. some of whom already resent being created ‘as tools’ for my survival… then killing them in front of their eyes. The ethics were dubious, and the optics even worse…

Another option is possible if you seek it out. A chip in the brain that supresses the uncontrolled growth. However, this option means that the corporation that sent you on this merry trip would find out about everyone, maybe be able to track them…

It was a hard choice. I spoke to everyone, we had all-hands meetings in the kitchen, arguing about the best approach. I gave them the go-ahead for this to be fully their decision – they held a family meeting in the kitchen, voted on which approach to go for… and it was a tie. Damnit.

There was no way around it. I was going to have to decide the fate of my Alters.

This kind of round-table discussion is something that’s pretty common in DID therapy, from what I can gather. I know I’ve used it a number of times. Sometimes when you’re finding yourself going back and forth on your choices in your day to day life in the world, you just need to go inside, get together and say, “Ok guys, I know there are a lot of strong opinions about this, and we’re going in circles on the outside… so family meeting time….”

This is often the case with decisions that affect the body in DID. Think about something like, oh I don’t know, the decision to support transitioning gender through HRT and surgery. There are irreversible changes you’re making to your body, that affect everyone – but maybe not everyone inside is on the same page. Well, welcome to my world back in 2023 – and how I discovered I was plural before I knew what dissociation, multiplicity, or DID were… before I had language for any of this. We talked things out & found a way forward, but this stuff still comes up with all kinds of decisions today.

Anyway…

Back in the game – I chose the chip option. We cured everyone. No more imminent death. Phew. But half of my Alters were pissed at the idea of potentially being on a corporate leash, their brains further tampered with, or who knows what. I was so torn about the whole thing,

I nearly save-scummed and loaded and changed my mind. But fuck it, stick to your guns, Riley. We’ll work things out, we always do.

Then, suddenly, I got hit in the head really hard. By my first Alter & closest friend out here, Jan Technician. The world faded.

This feels a lot like a Jesse switch.

Fuck.

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The Alter rebellion

Jan wakes up, to Jan Scientist’s heartwarming bedside manner (I love him, but he’s a dick, sometimes…) Turns out three of my Alters knocked me out, took a truck that Jan Technician had fixed up, and made their own way out into the barren wasteland of this planet. We’re still trying to outrun the sunrise. Magnetic storms abound. Our navigation is fried, and nearly half our crew, including the person who knows how to fix shit around here, have gone AWOL.

Jesus, this game knows how to do tension. This is almost as chaotic as me on a Monday morning.

This ‘rising tension, then blacking out and waking up, finding you’ve split into two camps, and the other has been doing shit without you‘, is what ‘switching’ is like for me. I don’t know – I don’t understand that bit very well still, and it’s better to focus on looking after everyone in the first place, rather than worrying about the possibility of switching. Still, sometimes it just… happens, y’know?

Long story short, you find a way to track your guys, and catch up to them. They’ve holed up and started making a base in a mountainside, to try and weather the sunrise. They don’t want your help.

Well, tough. Turns out they don’t have enough supplies to make it through another week, let alone weather the impending doom waiting for them… I give them supplies. Help them out while we live, divided, in two groups. Two sub-systems, if you like…

Eventually, through a combination of acts of good faith, shared needs, and the irresistible call of bromantic reconciliation, we reunite in our base and make the final preparations for the rescue ship.

There are more twists and turns before we make it out of here, but we’re together again.

Phew. Love you guys.

I’ve had enough Alter rebellions of my own to know how that feeling of missing a big part of your inner family goes. Reuniting takes work, and a lot of swallowing your pride, to be able to make space to say, “I can’t force you to come back – but there’s a place for you here if you choose it.”

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The life and works of Jan Scientist

The rebellion was a good example of what happens when a decision that impacts the body is rejected or disliked by a faction of the whole.

But sometimes, alters want more than to be part of a harmonious family. Sometimes they want the world to see them as an individual.

Of all the Alters I journeyed with, one valued independence from the rest of us the most – Jan Scientist.

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Towards the end of the game, he has just finished reconstructing & completing his “ground-breaking research that could change the world”. This man is never short on confidence in his ability & achievements – and he’s come through for us so many times, I fully believe him when he says this work is going to matter to the world.

Still, something’s off. He’s quiet, distracted. That’s not like him. I ask him what’s up:

Turns out – he wants to feel like he matters, too.

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Jan Scientist: “It’s just that I thought I’d be more happy about completing that old research of mine, but the more I think about it, the less reasons I have to celebrate. What now? What I mean is, it’s a big success, but so what? Even if I do make it back alive, no one will ever know who’s behind it.”

Jan: “Why not? We can tell them.”

Jan Scientist: “Tell them what? Surely you don’t think anyone will let me be a part of society like a normal human being. Publicly, I won’t even exist.”

Jan: “But you will exist as Jan Dolski…”

Jan Scientist: “No. In this world, you are Jan Dolski.”

Jan: “Does it really make such a difference? I mean, we’re both Jan Dolski”

Jan Scientist: “It makes a difference to me. Look at us! We are two completely different people.”

Jan: “More like two completely different quantum states of the same person. Of all my Alters, you should be most aware of that.”

Jan Scientist: “I was aware of that when I woke up. But then my existence started moving forward in time and I ceased to be an abstract being suspended in a single moment. I became a physical body progressing on an individual real life path. You see, I don’t need the world to remember my name.

I want it to acknowledge my distinctive existence.”

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It’s kind of a heartbreaking thing to hear. Some of my inner fam feel the same way sometimes.

For us, it’s not so much about names, but just wanting to be seen… witnessed… accepted… loved… for who we each are. We’re an “Us” made of “I’s”, I guess. We all know we’re parts of a whole, that we share a body and a brain, and that we’re in this together – I don’t think we’d want it any other way. We come as a squad – but sometimes we also like our individual contributions to be recognised, inside and out.

There’s so much more I could say – but I think that’s as good a place as any to call it for The Alters.

Edit: I totally lied, because turns out I had a lot more to say – so I continue exploring my love for The Alters in a follow-up post here.

Until next time – be kind to yourselves, kiddos

Riley & Riley Scientist, Riley Dancer, Riley Pianist, Riley Psychologist, Riley Boxe…

…. ok, ok….

Take care y’all. – Riley & fam ❤

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1. Fraser GA. Fraser’s “Dissociative Table Technique” Revisited, Revised: A Strategy for Working with Ego States in Dissociative Disorders and Ego-State Therapy. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 2003 Sept 1;4(4):5–28.

2. Twombly J. Trauma and Dissociation Informed Internal Family Systems: How to Successfully Treat C-PTSD, and Dissociative Disorders. 2022.

3. Steam Community [Internet]. 2022 [cited 2025 Oct 9]. Find out more about our ideas and inspirations for The Alters! :: The Alters General Discussions. Available from: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1601570/discussions/0/3360272431825074953/