The Alters

The Alters requires time, flexibility and some moments of contemplation to really appreciate all it has to offer. The beauty is in the details, such as the nuances in dialogues, the subtle differences between each personality of the same person, and also the way that the narrative grips you and takes you with it to a place where time is as precious as scarce.

All games build on or look back at what’s come before. The Alters makes a delicious stew out of familiar ingredients, both from other 11 bit studios games and popular genres. Taking survival and building mechanics and adding a complex layer of social simulation isn’t entirely foreign to this developer, but The Alters feels genuinely original, and that’s a bit miraculous in an industry full of sequels and remakes. Ironically, while the game might be about clones, The Alters is anything but a copy of something else.

From its philosophical musings to its management and exploration, The Alters pulls you in from the opening and refuses to let go. It has the same quality of a good strategy game where real life hours get sucked away as you tick off tasks and work towards goals, but it’s even more engaging because you want the answers to all of its mysteries, too. Minus some iffy technical performance – frames drop in certain areas, and there’s some strange flickering around character models occasionally – it’s brilliantly executed, completely original, and just the right level of stressful.

The Alters is a masterful evolution of 11 bit studios’ signature grim survival formula. Instead of pushing players into abstract moral quandaries, it offers something more personal: a sci-fi tale of regret and self-reconciliation. Stranded on a deadly planet, lone survivor Jan Dolski creates alternate versions of himself — each shaped by paths not taken. These “Alters” are not clones but fully realized personalities, forcing Jan to confront his own failings while managing survival. Beneath its familiar gameplay loop lies a deeply human story about identity, missed chances, and emotional repair. This is survival — not of the body, but of the soul.

Questions like how to reconcile with oneself, how to pursue personal growth, and how to decide the fate of different versions of "you" lie at the heart of The Alters - and they are exactly the kind of existential territory 11 bit studios excels at exploring.

The Alters is a highly atmospheric sci-fi character study of one man who meets the effects of the formative choices he’s made throughout his life face to face. Managing Jan’s relationships with his alternate selves while extracting enough resources from a hostile alien environment to survive is a balancing act on top of a balancing act, and it cleverly builds up the pressure over the course of its story. Exploration of these barren but eye-catching maps presents a series of puzzles and threats without resorting to blasting aliens, and the conversations and moral dilemmas that arise from Jan’s clones are a novel way to approach a game like this. It’s clearly not a big-budget game with resources to throw at cinematics and character models, but it does a lot with a little to tell its story effectively, and its occasional interface quirks don’t get in the way of that.

The Alters spreads itself thinly, approaching heady subject matter with little imagination and shallow dialogue. Coupled with irritating resource management, cumbersome traversal, and an ever-ticking clock that harms its narrative pacing, 11 Bit's ambitious survival game is only for those who love deadlines and suffering.

GOTY 2025. I wanna see my alters, I am sure they would be so bad , but still exciting!

Even though it's not a genre I'd usually play, I really enjoyed it. The dialogues were nice, the mechanics and pacing were also good.

For everything that The Alters does remarkably well: the premise, visuals, non-transparent choices, immersion, resource management, and more. I found myself constantly disappointed by a lot of the voice acting, writing, and most importantly, the shallow philosophy of the game. Maybe I missed something and have to replay the game, but even after thinking about it for a bit, I don't understand how Jan Dolski ever takes the threats of "You're going to be perceived as a monster for cloning yourself" seriously when he has a completely valid and plausible story and can just throw 10x more incriminating evidence right back at the company. These same grievances when it comes to how harshly the developers want to judge me for things that the game not only forced me to do but also things that are just binary 1 or 0 choices (Why can't I just put Jan Miner on a smaller dose of painkillers?) are actually something that bothered me in some of 11 bit studios previous games (Frostpunk). It's just a shame that not much was done to push these choices into more morally grey-feeling ones. Because if that were the case, The Alters might have been one of my favourite experiences of the year.

This game is so annoying and frustrating. Every time I think I progressed in the game something happens to make my game miserable. The alters rebels for no reason,every modules broke down, there is no space for more resources or a new thing to build, ... And I am on the easy level. This is only frustration. I would like to have fun, to put a strategy in place. Let me game in peace. I know that they are trying to define an emergency environment with stress etc.... But the only sensation that is left when I close the game after 2 or 3 hours is "It was like the worst boring work in real life". I don't game to work. I want to have fun ! And stress and emergencies and micro managing a crew of dumb idiots is not fun.

Its an okay game with a LOT of bugs, NO replayability and a lot of psychological warfare. IF done right this game could be an okay-ish and interesting book but the systems that pair with each other are just frustrating. After 8 hours I couldn´t get myself to finishing the game because It felt like an Sci Fi Addon for the Sims 4