11 Bit Studios has a bit of a reputation for bleak, thought-provoking games that punch you in the soul and leave you emotionally drained on the floor. This War of Mine and Frostpunk both stood out because they didn’t just challenge your reflexes or resource management—they challenged your morals. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that The Alters picks up that same mantle and runs with it into sci-fi territory, asking the classic question: “What if you could meet the version of yourself who didn’t screw everything up?”
That’s the crux of The Alters. You play as Jan Dolski, a poor sod marooned on a hostile alien planet. The only way to escape is to keep his fancy hamster-wheel of a base rolling across the terrain to avoid being incinerated by the sun, all while gathering resources, fixing constant breakdowns, and dealing with clones of himself made using a weird substance called Rapidium. It’s a stressful day job with a side hustle in existential crisis, all played through the medium of a survival-management game.
Available On: PC, Xbox Series S/X (Game Pass), PlayStation 5
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: 11 Bit Studios
Published By: 11 Bit StudiosReview code provided by the publisher.
And if all that shite wasn’t enough, you also need to negotiate with the boss who keeps calling in to make demands, not least that you bring home plenty of Rapidium. If that wasn’t bad enough, some idiot even gave your ex-wife the phone number for your space base, because apparently the threat of being burned alive or potentially murdered by yourself just isn’t enough to deal with. Honestly, the ex-wife is probably the real threat in that scenario. Maybe you can pawn a clone off on her?
It’s… well, it’s a lot to deal with. Shove aside the sci-fi moral dilemmas and philosophical discussions that arise from playing God, and what you’ve basically got is a game about being a mid-level manager of a fucking zoo full of highly-trained but incredibly belligerent monkeys.
Each day in The Alters plays out on a tight timer. You’ve only got a limited window before the deadly sun swings back around, forcing you to either haul your mobile base to safety or be cooked alive like a jacket potato. That means every moment counts. You’ll spend your precious daylight hours heading out in third-person to scavenge resources like metal, organics, and crystals, marking nodes for your Alters to harvest. But collecting raw materials is just the start—back in the base, those same resources need to be refined and processed into dozens of different components: filters for surviving radiation, structural parts for base upgrades, and various doodads needed to keep your crew alive and your sanity intact.
Crafting is at the heart of the gameplay loop. You need to churn out exploration tools like ladders and anchors to access new areas, fabricate vital parts to expand your base with new rooms, and keep everyone fed, rested, and sane. Every system feeds into another—can’t build a new room without structural frames, can’t make frames without processed metals, can’t get processed metals without a functioning refiner, and so on. All of this forces tough choices about how to spend your time and resources. Do you upgrade living quarters to keep the Alters happier, or do you build a new battery so you can explore further? It’s a tightrope act of priorities, and the constant ticking clock adds a real sense of pressure to the otherwise methodical resource management.
Exploring and mining is handled by crafting mining outposts and plopping them down, before connecting back to base with pylons. First, though, you have to use an awkward scanning system to locate deposits, which feels like it was built purely to eat into the already limited time you get per day. Loose resources scattered about the place can be picked up too, while you’re busy blasting through walls or picking up personal items which can be given to alters to boost their mood.
Here’s a general day in the life of Jan: you wake up and immediately assign some Alters to mining for organics and metals, while you head to crafting stations to pump out radiation filters and mush for the crew to eat. Then it’s off out the door to grab minerals because you need to make bridge anchors to cross a lava river. But wait, because everything in the base is breaking, the miner is having some sort of weird meltdown, there’s a magnetic storm coming, you need to build more storage, the sun is on its way to end your game, the boss is on the phone, the alters all want something, there’s weird-arse anomalies floating about and jesus fucking christ would everybody just shut up for five seconds, I can’t even hear myself think!
The other thing you have to deal with is the multiple clones of yourself running around the place, all voiced by Alex Jordan, who seems to be having great fun swapping accents. Their attitudes toward you tend to range from apathy to downright hatred, and in one instance murderous rage. To keep everything running and the base from being turned into the shittiest sauna ever, you’ll need to massage these various personalities via dialogue choices and deciding whether to spend resources on their needs and wants. They sure don’t make it easy, mind you – by act 1, one of my alters had chopped his arm off, possibly because I took his drugs away. You need these walking, talking embodiments of mental health functioning so that you can assign them to maintaining the base, drilling for resources you’ve marked out and about 1 billion other jobs.
There’s something brilliantly messed up about the entire concept, and in true 11 Bit fashion, it’s not just a gimmick. These aren’t generic clones—they’re alters, born from different paths your life could have taken. One might be a war vet, another a computer engineer, and yet another a broken addict. Each one comes with a skillset you need to survive, but also with baggage you’ll need to unpack if you want them to function properly. The psychological element isn’t just window dressing—it’s integral to the gameplay and narrative. The moral choices feel genuine and heavy, offering rich “what if” scenarios that are compelling enough to warrant multiple playthroughs. You simply can’t see all the alters in one run, and that’s a big part of what makes The Alters so replayable.
The comparisons to Duncan Jones’ Moon are obvious—and intentional. This is sci-fi in the classic sense: philosophical, character-driven, and more interested in identity than aliens. It doesn’t have blockbuster bombast. It’s closer in spirit to a moody indie film with a double-A budget, and while that budget is usually used very well—especially in the game’s art design—you can see the seams in the facial animations and the occasionally janky movements. But damn if it doesn’t still manage to be visually striking, with its moody lighting, stark alien landscapes and the base itself, which looks like a hamster wheel made by Ikea after a few drinks.
The problem is that I’d have to lie to say I liked playing The Alters. That isn’t a fault of the game—the survival and management elements are executed very well, as the many other glowing reviews and loving comments from players can attest. No, the issue is purely with me and my malfunctioning brain. Due to some boring personal reasons, I’m a little… er, frazzled at the moment, and the result was that my brain rebelled at all of the management and resources and decisions and constant need to be doing all the things but only being able to do some of the things. It felt overwhelming, in a way, like a job that was weighing me down. In short, playing it felt stressful, but not in the enjoyable way that other 11 Bit titles like Frostpunk did. That isn’t the fault of The Alters, though.
In Conclusion…
So here’s the honest truth: The Alters is a brilliant game. It’s clever. It’s original. It’s got all the emotional weight and moral murkiness you’d expect from 11 Bit, wrapped up in a fascinating sci-fi package. But it’s not going to be for everyone. The complexity of managing your base, your clones, and your sanity can be too much. The technical issues at launch—some of which are still being ironed out—don’t help. And if you’re already mentally wiped like I was, it can feel like too much of a slog.
But if you’re in the right headspace? The Alters is one of the most unique narrative experiences of the year. It’s ambitious, heartfelt, and packed full of clever ideas that deserve to be played, discussed, and dissected. Just maybe don’t let your clones read the reviews—you don’t want them getting any ideas.
