The Alters Review – Survival, Choices, and Sci-Fi Brilliance!?

If there’s a singular theme to unify most of 11 Bit Studios’ development portfolio, it is the lengths people will go to survive.  This War of Mine challenged us to be civilians in a warzone and choose the sacrifices we’d make to pull through.  The Frostpunk series mixed traditional city-building with ethical decision-making in a colony on the brink of collapse.  Both cases demanded that we choose between bad and worse - do we put our children to work in the mines if it means proper heat for our homes?  Should we rob or kill defenseless innocents for the chance to live another day?  And if we come out the other side alive, are we the same people we once were?

The Alters brings a new perspective to this question.  It not only imbues 11 Bit’s themes with fresh and fascinating new ideas, but creates a dynamic, reactive framework from which emerges some of the most creative science fiction I’ve ever experienced.  It’s a mind-bogglingly ambitious combination of gameplay systems I’ve never once seen before.  And when paired with an evolutionary leap in 11 Bit’s own multi-layered narrative style, I was left more or less superglued to my screen, sleep be damned.  Needless to say, I cannot wait to tell you about it.

The Alters puts you in the unenviable shoes of Jan Dolski, a builder sent on a spacefaring expedition in search of a rare and mysterious element called rapidium.  I’m not here to be a spoilery Sally, so I’ll leave it for you to learn about what exactly makes rapidium so desirable.  But all spoilers aside, Jan’s journey does not go well.  He crash-lands on a distant planet with a harsh, desolate landscape and extreme radiation at night.  His entire crew is dead.  And to make things far worse, this planet exists in a triple star system, a concept that will be very familiar to my fellow Three-Body Problem fans.  Because of the unpredictable way this system’s suns move, Jan faces the looming threat of a sunrise that will burn the entire landscape to hell.  His only chance of survival is to operate his mobile base, a massive, imposing structure shaped like a giant wheel, and move it away from the sun.  Problem is – this job is meant for a team, and Jan is just one guy.  Well, at first.

Within the base’s onboard quantum computer, Jan finds an unusual piece of technology called the Mind Record.  By browsing through its linear sequence of loosely connected organic blobs, you can read brief passages describing Jan’s core memories up to this point in time – his loves, his losses, choices he’s proud of and choices he regrets.  I know, right?  This computer is such a stalker.

With the power of rapidium though, you can pick between a small number of these nodes and branch them.  What kind of person would Jan become if he had taken on that research program when he had the chance?  If he had moved abroad with his girlfriend Lena?  Or if he had confronted his alcoholic father?  Well, if Jan hopes to survive, he’s going to have to find out.

The quantum computer can forecast the consequences of changing Jan’s past to create the alters – clones of himself that develop along these branching neural pathways to specialize in scientific research, mining, therapy, medicine, and so on.  And now he has a crew, albeit one acutely aware that the lives they remember in such intimate detail no longer exist and never did.  What could possibly go wrong?

Your time in The Alters will be split among three core gameplay elements that feed off one another in increasingly interesting ways.  The first and arguably largest part is the exploration of the harsh landscape Jan finds himself stranded in.  There are three core acts in The Alters’ story, each taking place in a different region of the planet.  In every case, you’ll have to venture outside the base with whatever supplies you can conjure up, including battery packs for your suit, mining rigs to farm resources, pylons to actually transfer those resources to your base, and a large enough number of other devices that it’s hardly worth breaking them down here.  As you explore, the spiderweb of pathways, caverns, shortcuts, and hazardous obstacles will gradually reveal themselves and require careful consideration if you intend to get back unscathed. 

That’s because you have limited time outside of the base before damaging nightly radiation starts to take effect, and that time will go by in a fast-forwarded instant every time you choose to mine resources yourself.  Generally, you’ll be better off just finding your way around and discovering the resource deposits you need – minerals, organic material, metals, and so on – and creating a network of nodes that allows them to be siphoned back to your base.  This isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds, since you’ll encounter obstacles like rock walls and cliffs requiring specific tools or suit energy to get past.  You’ll also need to deal with a variety of scientific anomalies, some merely inconvenient and others… well… I’ll leave it at that.

If there’s anything worth comparing The Alters’ exploration to, surprisingly, it’s probably Death Stranding.  Both games place emphasis on the traversal of beautiful but barren landscapes using a variety of tools to take care of obstacles and anomalies, and build infrastructure to help you get around faster and more efficiently.  Where The Alters has a major leg up on Death Stranding, thankfully, is that it adds every conceivable quality of life feature you can imagine so that any sort of tedium is kept far at bay.  Any base management that needs to be done while you’re out can be quickly accessed through an in-game menu. 

Any mining rigs you build can be instantaneously fast-traveled between, and you can also use them to charge your suit if your energy depletes from climbing or dealing with anomalies.  While mining rigs can only be placed on resource deposits, you can also just put fast travel pylons wherever you want as long as you’ve crafted enough to be able to do so.  The result is that you rarely have to manually walk through spaces already explored as long as you’ve built the infrastructure necessary to fast travel to.  This deftly avoids the sort of tedium that Death Stranding was, in my opinion, rightly critiqued for, even if you could argue that monotony was part of the point.

The second major part of The Alters’ gameplay is base-building, and this is the piece where you’ll almost certainly feel a hefty dose of Frostpunk DNA, albeit with an intensely different context.  You’ll frequently add new modules to your base not just for logistical needs like farming food, cooking in a kitchen, or housing stores of rapidium, but also in response to the needs of your alters.  They’ll want dormitories built so they don’t have to sleep on the floor, a social room to play beer pong and watch movies, a gym to blow off steam, and even a contemplation room to attend therapy sessions if you’ve managed to print the version of Jan that became a shrink.  Naturally, all of these rooms require resources, so you’ll often be tailoring your exploration and mining priorities toward what it is you need to build next.

The last part is, of course, interacting with the alters themselves.  It turns out that each branch of Jan Dolski became a noticeably different person, and not only will each alter frequently disagree on the best course of any given action, but as their leader, you’re on the hook for anything you do that they don’t support.  Any decision you make can impact the way an alter feels about you, which in turn can change the way the story unfolds.  You’ll have to manage each alter’s needs by talking to them and understanding their mood, fulfilling side objectives to keep them happy, and learning about yourself by understanding what happened in each of their respective timelines.  This is where you’ll find the meat of The Alters’ reactive storytelling. 

Because not only is the writing and voice acting here excellent, but its thematic deep dive into the consequences of so literally confronting the choices of your past doesn’t pull a single punch.  You’ll have an alter that’s struggling to work because he misses his wife, who you separated from in your own timeline.  You’ll have another alter who lost an arm in his life path, and now suffers from reverse phantom pain after the quantum computer grew him a new one.  Alters that get pissed at you can get pretty snarky too – in one case, I completed a relatively minor side objective for an alter who had vehemently disagreed with me on something a couple of days prior.  Upon reporting this side objective’s completion, he gave me some snarky shade about how glad he was that I diverged from our extremely important, time-sensitive mission for some relatively minor bullshit. 

Thankfully though, your time with the alters isn’t all serious all the time – I mentioned the social room that includes a TV and beer pong, and was delighted to learn that these aren’t just visual window dressing.  Beer pong is a fully-fledged minigame you can play with your alters to cheer them up, and it’s surprisingly fun.  Your TV can be used to play movies you find in discarded luggage strewn around the landscape, and most of these are really entertaining, including an animated short that gave me many Rick & Morty vibes and more than a few hearty belly laughs.  I even love that when you’re not watching TV in the social room, it’ll play footage from other 11 Bit published games like Frostpunk, Indika, and Moonlighter.

When it comes down to work, though, you’ll need to assign each alter to a given job on or off the base, like farming resources from a specific mining outpost, crafting necessary items in the workshop, maintaining the base to ensure nothing fails, or taking on kitchen duty to make sure everybody is well-fed.  The Alters doesn’t feel much like a survival game, per se, but there are gentle survival elements like the need to make sure your alters don’t starve, lest they get overly hangry and plan a rebellion – no judgment, I’d do the same.

The logistical problem is that you’ll frequently be in a situation of not having enough alters to do everything that needs to be done, and this creates a tense system of priority management. 

The game runs on a tight day and night cycle where once you hit 8 p.m., you’ll become tired and each task you approach will be done less efficiently.  Continue working till 11 p.m. and onward, and you’ll become completely exhausted and eventually collapse.  So, each day you wake up, you’ll need to decide what resources are most important, what objectives you need to tackle, who needs to be doing what, and make sure it’s all being done efficiently enough to be prepared for the apocalyptic sunrise.  Totally chill work environment.  And yet, despite their literal impending doom, the alters still crunch less than the developers of Cyberpunk had to.  Don’t they know burnout is a creative necessity?

The Alters has an absurd amount going on at once between its myriad systems, as there’s a constant flow of priorities to manage, things to build, areas to explore, and problems to deal with.  But none of it ever feels overwhelming because it’s a game that seeks to have you engage in its many systems only at the level of detail necessary, and not get bogged down in the minutiae.  It’s full of small, convenient touches like the uphold system, which allows you to set a minimum inventory of any craftable item you want on-hand at all times, and automatically allocates resources to it accordingly.  Any alters that finish a job they’re doing will automatically volunteer for a different one too, and you can accept or deny that assignment with the simple click of a button.  Even getting around the base is slick and quick since the elevator moves floors instantaneously with the flick of a thumbstick.

I hate to gush, but my god – I just can’t remember the last time I’ve been this impressed with the way a game juggled so many overlapping systems.  They interlock so intuitively that each and every piece feels essential.  The Alters’ exploration is rewarding and suspenseful, its base-building is fun and engaging, its survival mechanics feel tense without becoming annoying, its storytelling is immersive and compelling, and the way it trusts you to make decisions and just deal with the consequences feels like it shouldn’t work nearly this well.  I haven’t even covered the way you’ll communicate with members of the Ally Corporation that sent you on this mission in the first place, and the decisions in play when your priorities and theirs don’t align, but there’s simply no time to cover everything.

Visually, I can’t stress enough how happy I am to report that this is an Unreal Engine 5 game that doesn’t stutter and has great performance out of the box, and includes frame rate-enhancing features like DLSS and frame generation should you choose to utilize them.  The initial bootup will begin with a lengthy shader compilation process, but the time this takes is well worth it for how smooth the game feels.  It also has absolutely perfect ultrawide support and looks spectacular on a 32:9 monitor (which is how I played most of it) and to my absolute surprise, runs pretty decently on Steam Deck without looking like Vaseline-smeared garbage.  To test it, I turned the settings to low, activated FSR3, and turned FSR frame generation on given that most of this game doesn’t require fast reflexes, so some latency is, in my opinion, acceptable.  The result was 60-80 fps in the base and around 40-50 fps outside of the base, with occasional drops into the 30s when a lot was going on.  It’s far from my favorite way to play the game given how stunning it looks on a high-end PC, but it’s perfectly playable and manages decent image quality as long as FSR artifacts don’t bother you.

I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but the sound design is also excellent.  The ambient noise of the game’s environments coupled with the aggressive thrum of nearby anomalies adds the perfect level of tension as you explore, and the game’s voice actors totally nail it, even when a line or two can occasionally feel off.

If I’m honest with you, and I always am, I hardly have any negative notes here unless I start to get nitpicky.  The “combat” you get into with anomalies as the game goes on can start feeling a bit routine, so it’s worth setting the combat difficulty to easy if that starts to bug you.  And while I can hardly fault a game this complex for having a few things left to polish, it’s worth noting that it does need a patch for a few minor items that will hopefully be fixed on or soon after launch day.  These include a number of typos I saw in the dialogue, minor bugs like a pylon that randomly disconnected from my base and needed to be rebuilt, an objective I failed that never disappeared from my task log, and a one-time situation where I needed to reload a recent checkpoint because an alter I had to speak to went stiff and unresponsive.

As some of you may know, Frostpunk is one of my favorite indie games of all time.  And yet, The Alters takes a hefty step further by adding an exceptional multi-dimensional narrative that harmonizes beautifully with the gameplay loop and exploration that feels as immersive as it is rewarding.  Calling it the single best indie game of 2025 so far or the best game I’ve ever reviewed for I Dream of Indie Games would be completely correct, but doesn’t even say enough – this is 11 Bit Studios’ magnum opus, and one of the single best games I have ever played, full stop.  One full run of its campaign took me just over 20 hours, but the enormous replayability derived from decisions made in that runtime will make it so that for many, 20 hours may be just the beginning, as it’s literally impossible to see everything or even generate every possible alter in a single run.  This is a specific combination of genres that won’t be a match for literally everyone, but those with the slightest hint of interest should be making time for it. This is the sort of masterpiece that puts the AAA market to pitiable shame, and does so without an ounce of compromise.  Do.  Not.  Miss it.

ESSENTIAL