The Alters review
An extraordinary, unwieldy, high-concept management game in which you grow a workforce from your own psychological baggage.
- Developer: 11 Bit Studios
- Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
- Release: June 13th 2025
- On: Windows
- From: Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store
- Price: $32/£27/€32
- Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11
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.
In this winningly uncategorisable endeavour – equal parts Severance, Moon, Astroneer and The Sims – you play Jan Dolski, the solitary survivor of an interplanetary geological expedition. You are marooned on a planet where time is both managed and mined in the form of Rapidium, a magical substance that groans like a foghorn and can be used to accelerate the temporality of creatures and objects.
As in Frostpunk, the apocalyptic rhythms of the planet itself are your greatest enemy. While you wait for rescue, you must keep your spacebase rolling in order to escape a devastating sunrise, its proximity advertised at the beginning of each in-game 24-hour cycle. The immediate problem is that you can’t operate the base alone. But your employers at Ally Corporation back on Earth have a solution: use Rapidium to flash-grow clones of yourself, based on the speculative alternate lifepaths mysteriously mapped out for Jan in the base’s Quantum Computer.
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun
The result is a narrative-led strategy experience of two, fidgety halves. On the one hand, you need to expand the base using resources extracted from the surrounding landscape, exploring mildly labyrinthine 3D maps in your spacesuit and setting up drills and fast-travel pylons, while dealing with hazards such as radiation and billowing, transparent anomalies. These maps have a touch of the metroidvania, in that exploration is sharply and, at times, laboriously constrained by gadgets: you’ll need battery power for your grappling gun, and charges for your laser drill in order to blast through walls of rubble. They are also littered with drop pods containing Jan’s belongings, conveniently scattered across the campaign path during the crash landing.
On the other hand, you have to supervise your growing team of roads-not-taken – each heroically voiced by the same actor, Alex Jordan – whose feelings toward you predictably range from grudging empathy to searing hatred. You need to attend to their overall living requirements, slotting dormitories and leisure facilities into the wheel, while also fielding individual requests, gifting them emotive relics (such as university hoodies), and helping them figure out the sheer insanity of their existence. You need to keep them alive during the periodic magnetic storms that, as with Frostpunk’s blizzards, induce a gruelling marathon to stay on top of dwindling supplies and deteriorating equipment. And you need to keep them chugging away at the resource deposits, research terminals and crafting stations so that you can reconfigure the base and get it moving before dawn.
In amongst all this, you must bluff and barter with your reptilian superiors back on Earth, who want you to hoover up as much Rapidium as possible. Just to make life a little zestier, one of them happens to be Jan’s ex-wife. All this lasts 20-30 hours and is divided into acts, each of which halts the base in a new region and hands you a fresh major obstacle to overcome, while dealing with any number of competing, smaller-scale crises. Oh, and in the evenings back at base you can play beer pong.
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun
It’s a lot to digest, more than many commercial video game publishers would consider “safe” in a market where players can’t go 30 seconds without checking their phones. One of the great pleasures of The Alters is simply the knowledge that it got made, that a group of plucky devs bore this curious chimera all the way to completion, that a crackpot concept such as this dared the waters of triple-A photorealism. Another pleasure is realising that all the majestic, hyper-nepotistic nonsense about literal “self-employment” is a platform for more relatable conversations about crunch and morale, about personality conflicts, labour conditions and ye olde capitalist alienation.
Above all, perhaps, The Alters is an alternately daft and devious deconstruction of the middle manager figure. It positions you as the interface between the execs, each a voice emerging from a wall of static in the Communications Room, and your grumbling subalternates.
The bosses are various flavours of untrustworthy. Maxwell, your overall manager, is a suave and calculating big dreamer, partial to Jobsian rhetoric but careful to wind it in. Lucas, the Nice One, is more obvious and charming in his manipulations. Lena, your ex, is the most sympathetic, but in some ways the least dependable, by virtue of your history. You must broadly keep them all happy to ensure the arrival of a rescue ship, and you will need their help for certain problems along the way. But you will also play tricks on them: lying about your decisions, lying about whether you’re collecting the all-important Rapidium, even lying about which particular Jan they’re talking to.
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun
Your alters, meanwhile, are both soulmates and uncanny aberrations that need to be deftly inserted into the workings of the base, though they’re pretty autonomous once given assignments. One of the initial wrangles when they emerge from the spacebase “Womb” is a question of semantics that doubles as a question of class: are they a version of you, or are you a version of them? Who gets to be Jan Prime, Ur-Jan, and who gets to be relegated to a Janist vocation such as Jan Botanist or Jan Refiner?
It’s a dilemma with serious practical import for 11 Bit’s designers. The game needs the alters to be your derivatives, your existential inferiors, your NPCs, in order to function as a management sim made up of generic employees with skills that befit certain base tasks. At the same time, the story’s thrill lies with the fact that the alters don’t see themselves as offcuts, particularly given that some of them were born from moments in Jan Prime’s life where, from their perspective, he chose weakness and they chose strength. Why are you entitled to a Captain’s Cabin, when you’re the Jan who left his mother all alone with his abusive dad?
The Alters does entertain the possibility of an actual uprising, but this is a canned insta-fail event with no meaningful follow-through that I’ve discovered. Still, there is ample room for conflict and angst. The whole thing is an absolute headfuck for all concerned. I cloned a miner to help me gather the metals and minerals I needed to bridge a lava river. Then I cloned a shrink to help the miner deal with how deranged he feels about having his lost arm “grow back”. I ripped our winsome, whiny Jan Botanist from a timeline in which he was happily married, and transformed him into a counsellor for managing relations with the woman who is suddenly his ex.
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun
The dialogue captures all this pretty well, both efficiently selling you on the bizarre stresses and gently expressing the differences between Jans. Admittedly, some of them do feel like pantomime creations in wigs with goofy accents, but the differences in, say, vocabulary can be delicate.
I know, for example, that the version of Jan who stood up to his dad is unlikely to use the word “absurd”. The soft-spoken Jan who became a doctor, meanwhile, is frightened by his clone body’s relatively undamaged hands. “They’re so… impeccable,” he breathes. The Jan who became an elite scientist has experience of Rapidium research from his “past life”, and does a lot of the emotional processing before he’s even gotten to his feet. Scientist Jan is powerfully arrogant – “I’m successful because I’m the version of you that doesn’t get discouraged by failure,” he tells you at one point – but he is also quite accommodating, in that he doesn’t much care about certain details as long as there is orderly progression.
Miner Jan is a different case entirely: a craggy, terrified man who finds peace in opiates and endless work. In my playthrough, he was the focus of the game’s very relatable exploration of crunch. While other Jans urge you to force the Miner to take time off, Miner Jan finds the idea condescending, even as he injures himself again and again on the job. “Stop being so noble and take advantage of it like a proper boss,” he tells you at one point. Eesh.
At times like these, you sense that 11 Bit are offering The Alters up as industry commentary. But this is no case study in how to be a caring manager, because the self-cloning premise won’t quite allow it. You’re supposed to look after your workers, and there’s a story ending which sees you siding with them against Ally Corporation, but those workers are also just thought experiments and mirrors in which to hone away your failings. You remain the centre of this rolling circle. As you guide each alter’s personal storyline towards a Lessons Learned reward that unlocks some custom dialogue, Jan Prime flowers under pressure, both confronting his own baggage and fleshing out his people skills in a way that is at once consoling and insidious. The further the base travels, the more complete he becomes, and the more and more he sounds like Maxwell.
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun
Inevitably, the writing creaks in places, at once stretched by the multiversal premise and cramped by the game’s conventional, act-based campaign and the rhythms of base management, which often don’t leave much time to track disgruntled Alters down for a chat. Each day is a rush to assign the Alters to tasks, plug in new rooms, capitalise on research that grants access to new areas, and ensure that you’re pulling in all the resources you need. Amid all that, the story would risk feeling rather drawn-out if you had to explain the Rapidium cloning thing to every fresh Jan in full. 11 Bit’s solution is the repeated onboarding instruction “read the mission logs”, which seemingly advances every Alter through their personal subplot to approximately the same point as the others.
There are also traces of Frostpunk’s somewhat clunky moral dilemmas, variations on the old “is this enough of an emergency to warrant child labour” gambit, but they’re better handled here because those implicated are proper personalities with branching dialogue. And there are a few bonding moments that are just cheesy, particularly when they go hand-in-glove with Simmish “morale improvement” mechanics such as watching movies with your Alters in the Social Room. Sure, I sprouted your whole mind and body from the litany of my regrets in order to help me pull a lever, but on the brighter side, let’s all have a jar and catch a romcom, eh?
I’ve been referring to The Alters as a genre hybrid throughout, and perhaps unfairly: rather than defining this as a jigsaw puzzle, we should portray it as a singular fable that has adopted familiar structures as needed. But I do cling to the idea of incompletely meshing genre parts, of wheels tumbling and grinding through worlds, because the tensions between those genres are evocative, illustrative.
The game’s need to be a reasonably performant piece of management software means that it can’t quite be a fluid and believable third-person action game. The spacebase is sort of a glorified menu (though there are proper menus as well) and menus need to be responsive, so the elevator whips you between levels with what ought to be bone-rupturing speed. The lesser Jans should be scraping Jan Prime off the ceiling every time he uses it, and the fact that this doesn’t happen seems appropriate to a story that can’t determine whether you’re a human being or one among many grades of mass-produced screwdriver.
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun
On a similar note, the game takes a pragmatic approach to time even before you start fooling around with Rapidium. When you hold a button to perform a task, Jan lurches into fast-forward, spinning through the hours with the shriek of a boiling kettle, till the standardised onset of “exhaustion” at 11pm sharp slams his blurring body to a halt. This shortcutting is a necessary convenience for the management sim player who doesn’t want to spend minutes watching a dude wield a drill. But again, it has thematic resonance. So much… velocity visited upon the flesh of one man, and none of it is enough, so back we go to the Womb.
