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When one of your Alters is a fashionista, you head to Paris Fashion Week
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When one of your Alters is a fashionista, you head to Paris Fashion Week

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Paris it is. The Alters is a hit, and it’s dressing up for a party. This one being Paris Fashion Week. It’s an odd place for the game to be, until you see they’ll be selling Jan’s iconic tracksuit. We love seeing video games coming to the masses, so check out the details below and grab your own tracksuit via this link.

The Alters review — No man is an island, entire of himself

How much are we as people the product of our decisions? Choosing to play in a band and bailing out on college might give you a completely different life experience than knuckling down and grinding out a career as a research scientist. Sure, you’re the same person, but these

Warsaw, Poland – June 25th, 2025 — In a reality shaped by choice and consequence, even the smallest expression can define who we are—just like inside the mobile base of The Alters—where a single life splits into many. Today, 11 bit studios and ZA/UM Atelier are proud to unveil The Alters collection: a fashion brand born from the DNA of the recently released and critically acclaimed sci-fi game, which explores the personal dimension of survival.

A result of the collaboration is a limited collection that translates the spirit of The Alters into high-quality, tailored apparel, which ZA/UM Atelier is known for. Each piece reflects the game’s themes of identity, utility, and choice—crafted with the same attention to detail that defines both studios.

With today’s announcement, three pieces from the collection are available for pre-order: the Jan Dolski Mission Jacket, the Mission Utility Pants, and the Dolly Baa-Baag—a fashionable nod to Molly the sheep, the silent sidekick whose gentle “baa” left an echo in many players’ hearts.

“The Alters is a game about who we are, and who we might’ve been. The way we present ourselves to the world – through clothing, expression, or even the smallest personal details – is deeply tied to the lives we live and the choices we make,” said Tomasz Kisilewicz, The Alters Game Director at 11 bit studios.

“This collaboration with ZA/UM Atelier felt like a natural extension of that philosophy – an embodiment of identity through design. We can’t wait to see how our community responds to this fusion.”

“Each member of our collective has deep admiration for the creative work of 11 bit studios,” stated Kristiina Ago, Head of ZA/UM Atelier. “The Alters’ deep and sometimes painful journey of ‘self’ seemingly implored us to dive into the texture, technique, utility, and storytelling that define Jan Dolski’s style. Our Paris Fashion Week exhibition is the culmination of two years of design exploration. We are extremely honoured to have been entrusted with extending The Alters’ experience, ZA/UM Atelier’s first studio collaboration, into the world of fashion.”

While three products are now available for official pre-order, a complete collection inspired by The Alters has been crafted. Born from a shared creative spirit between game and fashion design, the collection embodies values both companies hold dear: uniqueness, quality, and innovation.

The apparel premieres at Paris Fashion Week on June 25th, with the The Alters x ZA/UM Atelier Capsule rolling through the city on a curated mobile route:

The Alters Capsule Tour Stops – June 25th, Paris

-Start – 11:00 am CEST at: 7 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière (Premium Events office)
-Stop 1 – 11.30 am CEST at: 2 rue Beaurepaire (Place de la République) – 1h30 stop
-Stop 2 – 1:00 pm CEST at: 47 rue des Francs Bourgeois (Le Marais) – 1h stop
-Stop 3 – 4:00 pm CEST at: 34 rue de la Chaussée d’Antin (Opéra) – 1h stop
-Stop 4 – 5.30 pm CEST at: 3 place des Pyramides (Louvre) – 30 min stop
-Wrap up – 6:00 pm CEST at: 7 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière (Premium Events office)

View the first part of The Alters x ZA/UM Atelier collection and follow @atelierzaum and @zaumstudio for updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and details on how to make the Track Suit and Dolly Baa-Baag part of your own evolving identity.

Stay tuned to GamingTrend for more The Alters news and info!


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The Alters review | Rock Paper Shotgun
Game Reviews

The Alters review | Rock Paper Shotgun

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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.



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Screenshot from The Alters (2025).
Product Reviews

The Alters review: getting to know yourself has never been this fun

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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from The Alters, the latest game from developer and publisher 11 Bit Studios. From the trailers I’d watched, it seemed almost like parts of several different games were grabbed and hastily cobbled together into something that shouldn’t work – and yet, much like my hastily-cobbled-together base in-game, it does.

Review information

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Release date: June 13, 2025

Following Jan Dolski, a construction specialist on a space mission to find the ultra-rare element Unobtaini- sorry, ‘Rapidium’, The Alters meshes together survival, management sim, third-person action adventure, and decision-based narrative elements with apparent grace and ease. There’s a well-struck balance here, never tipping too far in any one direction, keeping you constantly engaged and on your toes. Less than two hours in, I was already having a blast.

Predictably, things go wrong almost immediately for poor Jan, and despite finding an abundance of Rapidium, he’s left stranded on a hostile planet with an approaching sunrise that will scorch him and his base to an irradiated crisp. Alone, desperate, and running out of options, he follows the highly questionable directions of a crackly voice on the base comms to utilize Rapidium’s mysterious qualities and create a duplicate of himself: an ‘alter’. After all, many hands make light work – and the rest of the original crew are too dead to help out.


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Seeing double

Needless to say, this planet is not exactly hospitable. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

The thing is, Jan’s duplicates aren’t exactly that. The core premise of The Alters is right there in the name, with each alternate Jan Dolski having a distinct – though familiar – personality and memories of a life that went a different direction at one pivotal moment or another. It’s an excellent central conceit for both a story and a game. Need a miner to help gather the resources required to survive on this desolate planet? Good news: in another life, Jan chose to pursue his father’s mining career. Bad news: Miner Jan has a substance abuse problem and crippling self-esteem issues, and you’re going to have to deal with that now.

This is where the narrative segment of the game comes in, with a wide variety of both one-on-one chats and group interactions to be had with Jan’s parallel selves. It’s reminiscent of chatting to your crew aboard the Normandy between missions in the Mass Effect series; although instead of a sleek spaceship, your base of operations in The Alters is a thin, blocky structure housed on a gyro inside a gigantic tire. It gives the story a sort of twisted road trip vibe, which I loved – check out Overland and Get In The Car, Loser! If you’re interested in some other very weird virtual road trips.

Best bit

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Jan’s rolling base is certainly unique – just don’t question the physical logistics of how such a vehicle would remain upright.

The ‘mobile base’ is just one part of the fantastic and occasionally goofy world-building on display here. True to 11 Bit Studios’ Polish heritage, the life Jan left behind to join this mission is a corporate sci-fi dystopia with a distinctly Eastern European flavor. Janky Europop plays from a jukebox in the social room you can build for the Alters to relax in; Jan’s childhood home is a nondescript mining town with brutalist concrete architecture; two Jan Dolskis bond over their shared love of pierogi. While the planetary backdrop of Jan’s current predicament might be a bit more par for the course, the injection of a little cultural identity helps massively in creating a more unique, interesting setting. The soundtrack is pretty good too, an appropriate blend of synthy overtures and foreboding background music.

I won’t delve too much into the plot to avoid spoilers (this is a story best experienced as blind as possible), but I will say as a lifelong sci-fi lover that the story is solid. The writing and voice acting are both excellent, with some interesting supporting characters and plenty of dialogue that serves to flesh out the characters and move the story along. Particular props go to Alex Jordan, who voices not just Jan but also all of his titular alters – and make no mistake, despite sharing the same origins, this is a greatly varied group of characters who don’t always get along. Listen up, Geoff Keighley, because I fully expect to see him nominated for Best Performance at the next Game Awards.

Too many cooks

See that weird glowing stuff? That’s Rapidium – and Jan’s going to need a lot of it to make more alters. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Speaking of not getting along, though: we’re all going to need to get along, or we’re all going to die.

Befriending Jan’s alters isn’t enough to survive with the radioactive sunrise mere days away. You need to put them to work, whether that’s producing food or equipment aboard the mobile base or gathering resources in the dangerous environment outside.

This is mostly done through a series of menu screens, which have clean, well-designed UIs, and managing your alters takes up a decent portion of your time in-game. They’re quite proactive; for example, if an alter in the workshop finishes building all the tools you’ve queued up for manufacturing, they’ll suggest moving to a different assignment, prioritizing stations aboard the base with unfinished workflows and no assigned staff.

It’s not the deepest management sim system I’ve ever seen – 11 Bit Studios previously developed Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2, which offers great complexity for hardcore fans of the genre – but it works well as one component of a broader story-driven survival game and keeps the focus on the micro rather than the macro. You can only have a maximum of six alters out of a possible nine (although two of them, Technician Jan and Scientist Jan, are mandatory for the plot – so it’s more like picking four out of seven).

Laying out your base smartly (as I have very much not done in this screenshot) is key to making the most of your limited resources. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

You’re also responsible for the base itself, meaning that you’ll need an alter – or yourself – on hand to carry out repair work when needed, and you’ll need to modify and expand the base to match the evolving demands of your journey across the planet’s surface to a promised rescue rendezvous. Thanks to the two-dimensional nature of your base-in-a-giant-tire, rooms are laid out in a grid and can be moved and slotted together Tetris-style to make the most of your available space.

This is another balancing act; everything needs to be correctly connected to function, and every new room added increases the total weight of your base and thus the amount of resources you’ll need to travel to the next area. There’s always a tradeoff; should you build the alters private cabins to help improve their mood, or make them bunk together in a far more space-efficient dorm room? Do you really need that greenhouse for manually producing proper food, when you could all survive perfectly well on processed organic mush?

Venturing forth

Scanning for mining deposits as you explore each new area is a vital task if you want to stay alive. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Of course, even with your alters hard at work, this is a team effort. Real boy Jan doesn’t get to sit on his hands while his clones do all the heavy lifting, no, sir. You need to make use of every precious hour before sunrise comes, because every single job your alters can do is also something you could also be doing yourself.

This is where the third-person exploration and action elements of the game come into play – though I use the word ‘action’ quite generously here, since The Alters doesn’t really have traditional combat. When I said ‘hostile planet’ earlier on, I wasn’t talking about angry local megafauna or marauding aliens. The areas outside the base are populated by strange, pulsating anomalies, which can deliver a potentially lethal dose of radiation on contact. Luckily, you can research and build the Luminator: a magic UV flashlight that can be used to target the floating cores of the anomalies and shrink them into a stable ball of useful resources with an admittedly rather satisfying vwoosh.

It’s perhaps the weakest component in The Alters’ otherwise flawless assembly of disparate parts, but it’s far from a deal-breaker. The anomalies just aren’t a particularly engaging threat, although later on, some more interesting variants do show up. One variety has two cores and rhythmically grows and shrinks in size; another warps spacetime in close proximity, causing you to lose hours in seconds while you remain within its radius.

I like the design of the Ally Corp spacesuits Jan and his alters wear – and even their standard-issue on-base clothes have little variations to help keep the alters distinct. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

The rest of the off-base gameplay is a bit more appealing; you explore, gather resources, and map out locations for fixed mining stations, which must then be connected to the base by setting up pylons before being operated by yourself or one of the alters. Your rolling base only makes pit stops at a handful of locations throughout the game, and the maps aren’t that large, but they do feel densely populated and hand-crafted – no sprawling procedurally-generated wilderness here. Sometimes, you’ll stumble across wreckage from your original crashed ship, and can recover personal effects that certain alters might appreciate, improving their mood.

Brothers in arms

Keeping those alters happy is no laughing matter, however. They can go hungry or become depressed, get injured on the job, or fall sick from radiation poisoning if you force them to work outside for too long. Sometimes you’ll find two or more of them in disagreement, at which point you’ll need to find a solution – and it’s not always possible to stay on everyone’s good side.

Some of these disputes are key to the overarching plot, while others are merely for character development and establishing personal conflicts – but I really appreciate how The Alters makes you stand on your decisions, even the smaller ones. A lesser game would have you pick a side and mete out judgment, with corresponding mood shifts based on your choice, but here you have to back up your words with actions or deal with the consequences. When one alter argues that we need more protection from radiation, while another insists that we should stop gathering irradiated metals altogether, you’re expected to follow through on your decision. Fail to build that radiation shield quickly enough after choosing to support that plan? Tough, now both alters have lost some respect for you.

I probably spent more time playing the beer pong minigame than I needed to. But I needed Jan’s alters to understand that he’s the king, and there’s no beating him. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to boost your alters’ mental states. Assigning them to work that fits their specialism is a good start, but you can also prepare better food, play beer pong (which has its own minigame), build a gym or a therapy room, or even settle in for a movie night with all of your alternate selves. Hilariously, the ‘movies’ you can uncover from the ship’s scattered wreckage are all live-action shorts made by YouTube comedy duo Chris & Jack, which can be viewed in their entirety while the Jans provide occasional commentary. It’s weird, but great. Hell, the only thing you can’t do is exactly what I would do in this situation, which is a sloppy make-out session with my clones.

Whatever your methods, ensuring that your self-made crew is healthy in body and mind is of paramount importance. An unhappy or rebellious alter will work fewer hours; an injured one can’t work at all. It all plays into the core idea that Jan – perhaps every version of him, in fact – simply wasn’t cut out for this job, and you’re constantly flying from one near-catastrophe to another. I opted to pick Doctor Jan as my final alter quite late in the game, and I’m glad I did: Miner Jan decided to overwork himself not long after, and kept coming back to base with increasingly severe radiation sickness.

The human touch

It’s nice to find your alters gathered to relax in their off-time during the (rare) periods when everyone seems to be getting along. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

In short, The Alters is nothing short of an artistic triumph. It’s a cheerfully strange game with a lot of heart, using its premise to ask genuine philosophical questions about the nature of memories and identity, but also managing to remain grounded in a story about people just trying to survive a terrible situation. At one point, Jan leads the alters in a (shockingly good) impromptu musical number. It’s silly, but it’s hard not to like how downright earnest it all is. It feels like something that was created with genuine love and care, an increasing rarity in today’s game industry landscape.

I wouldn’t call it an extremely challenging game overall, so if you’re expecting a gritty, difficult survival experience, you might be disappointed – although I’ve been a fan of management sims for a while, so players less familiar with the genre may find it a bit tougher to stay on top of each new crisis. There are separate difficulty settings for the anomaly combat and the resource economy, which is a nice touch.

Lastly, as a PC game, I found it ran well both on my RTX 4080 gaming PC and an older RTX 3060 gaming laptop, at 1440p and 1080p, respectively.

The game isn’t particularly long, either – my first playthrough clocked in at just shy of 20 hours, and I felt was taking my time with it – but there’s certainly some room for replayability based on the different available alters and multiple endings. After getting what I’d like to call a ‘good’ ending, I’m already itching to start over and say all the mean things I avoided saying the first time around. Watch out, space: here comes Asshole Jan.

Should I buy The Alters?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Accessibility

There are a small number of accessibility features available in The Alters, primarily focused on reducing some intrusive visual effects (like those caused by certain anomalies, or when Jan is drunk after too much beer pong). There’s also the option to adjust the font size of the subtitles and change the entire HUD scale – potentially useful for anyone who struggles to read small text.

A notable omission is a colorblind mode, although this might be a game where it wouldn’t actually make much difference; most of the management menu screens are fairly monochrome, and the game broadly manages to avoid overlapping UI elements.

How I reviewed Mario Kart World

I played through the majority of The Alters on a gaming PC equipped with an RTX 4080 GPU and Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, at 1440p resolution, and got a consistent 60+ fps at max settings. I also played a short segment of the game on my laptop, which has an RTX 3060, and found similarly reliable performance at 1080p once I’d tweaked the graphical settings a little.

It took me about 20 hours to complete a full playthrough of the game, which I spread out over the course of a week. I played with a mouse and keyboard, but you can use a controller too if that’s your preference. The game is also available on PS5 and Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

First reviewed June 2025



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How To Unlock The Tabula Rasa Clone In The Alters
Game Updates

How To Unlock The Tabula Rasa Clone In The Alters

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Are you curious about how to unlock the Tabula Rasa in The Alters? As their name suggests, this character is more of a blank slate, created from the very distant past of Jan Dolski’s life path, well before he had acquired knowledge and experience. That said, there’s a pretty specific way to turn this clone into a permanent character in your base. Likewise, please bear in mind that this guide contains spoilers.

How to unlock the Tabula Rasa in The Alters – Tabula Rasa clone guide

To unlock the Tabula Rasa, you must side with Lena when prompted to make a decision in Act 2. We’ve got all the details for you in our Act 2 cure – Maxwell or Lena guide, but we’re still going to mention all the important tidbits here.

How to create the Tabula Rasa clone

You can create The Alters’ Tabula Rasa clone after speaking with Maxwell and researching the QC Hacking tech. This gives you access to the Tabula Rasa alternate option in the Quantum Computer. You can find this option in the far-left portion of the Quantum Computer’s screen. Simply spend 20 rapidium and wait a few hours until your new clone has been “birthed” in The Womb.

Note that there’s also a short cutscene involving Jan Scientist, where you’ll see that the Tabula Rasa has briefly awakened.

The Tabula Rasa alterate option should appear in the Quantum Computer.

Siding with Lena and crafting the Neural Implants

Around the same time, you should also get a second opinion from Lena by calling her. She’ll tell you that there’s another potential cure. This involves crafting Neural Implants via the Workshop:

  • Each Neural Implant requires 10x metals, 30x minerals, and 20x rapidium.
  • You need one Neural Implant for each alter clone in your base (not counting the Tabula Rasa).

You must side with Lena and craft Neural Implants to ensure that the Tabula Rasa survives.

Important: This part of the game has a main quest called “A Thread of Hope – The Clock Is Ticking.” You have roughly three days to finish the above tasks before the group calls a meeting. Once Jan and his clones have a chat, you must choose this reply: “Let’s go for the corporate solution and apply the Neural Implants.”

If you pick the above response, the Tabula Rasa will survive. If not, you’ll end up siding with Maxwell and the Tabula Rasa will be experimented on and discarded.

Life with the Tabula Rasa in your base

Once you’re done with the above segment, progress normally until you complete Act 2. Then, during the “journey” interlude, you’ll notice that the Tabula Rasa is just happily walking around your base.

You can chat with him to learn about his naive and silly demeanor, though you won’t be able to assign him to any task.

Important: Siding with Lena has major repercussions for the rest of the campaign, since your variants who aren’t happy with the decision could leave your team for good.

You might just enjoy this fella’s company… or not.

That does it for our guide on how to unlock the Tabula Rasa in The Alters. Allowing this secret NPC clone/companion to survive also nets you the “Awareness” achievement. In any case, you can check our best clone characters guide to learn about the options that you should prioritize in your playthrough.

Can you help Jan Dolski and his clones survive their ordeal? Well, if you need more tips, you can head over to our The Alters guides hub.



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How To Survive Magnetic Storms In The Alters
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How To Survive Magnetic Storms In The Alters

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Are you worried about Magnetic Storms in The Alters? This strange phenomenon occurs periodically while exploring the surface of the strange world, often causing chaos inside your base. That said, there are several ways to mitigate potential damage and mishaps, which we will discuss in our guide.

How to survive Magnetic Storms in The Alters

The first Magnetic Storm occurs several days into your overland journey. When it happens, all hell will break loose, as Jan and his alters attempt to do everything they can to keep the base intact.

What happens during Magnetic Storms?

Here’s what you can expect during a Magnetic Storm:

  • Radiation sickness accumulates faster if you’re outside.
  • The base’s radiation shielding will also require more power, which means it will use up your Radiation Filters in the Machinery Room at an alarming rate.
  • Modules and sections of the base will incur damage, so Jan and his clones need to be on top of any repair duties.
  • All alters will work extended shifts, but this won’t affect their morale or happiness since everyone’s survival is of the utmost importance.

Note: If you run out of Radiation Filters and you’re unable to craft another one in time, then Jan and his crew will die.

Everyone has to put in the work when a Magnetic Storm occurs.

The Magnetic Storm Analysis tech

To survive Magnetic Storms in The Alters, you need to be well-prepared. The first thing you should do is research the Magnetic Storm Analysis tech via the Research Lab. If you have a Scientist, make sure he’s assigned in the room until the project is completed.

This particular tech notifies you a few days before the next Magnetic Storm occurs. An icon in the lower-right corner of the screen also counts down the remaining days and hours until this phenomenon triggers once more.

The best way to plan ahead when Magnetic Storms next occur

If you want to mitigate the damage from Magnetic Storms in The Alters, you must ensure that you have plenty of the following:

  • Radiation Filter – Costs 10x metals and 40x organics; placed inside the Machinery room to keep the base’s radiation shielding active.
  • Repair Kit – Costs 10x metals; used to fix damaged components and rooms so they remain functional.

These items can be queued via the “Uphold” system in the Production tab. Ideally, you’ll want at least three of these readied for any mishaps that may occur.

Moreover, you should look at the Assignments tab to see what your alters are doing. You’ll want to have at least two characters–one of whom ought to be the Technician–handle maintenance duties.

It’s risky but also rewarding if you go outside to gather resources in the middle of a Magnetic Storm.

Should you even go outside during Magnetic Storms?

Going outside during a Magnetic Storm can be quite risky. Radiation levels are higher than normal, though not quite as deadly as nighttime. That said, Magnetic Storms also provide a nifty buff: You’re able to mine rapidium and deep deposits faster while a storm is happening.

However, if Jan’s irradiation level has reached dangerous levels, then you should immediately fast travel back to your hub. You can rest in the Infirmary module if you’ve built it, which should help cure radiation sickness over time.

That does it for our guide on how to survive Magnetic Storms in The Alters. If you’re worried about other dangers on this mysterious planet, then you could check our anomalies and ALX guide.

Can you help Jan Dolski and his clones stay alive throughout their ordeal? Well, if you need more tips, you can head over to our The Alters guides hub.



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How To Destroy Anomalies And Find Planetary Samples In The Alters
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How To Destroy Anomalies And Find Planetary Samples In The Alters

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Are you looking for a way to destroy anomalies in The Alters? These odd and eerie objects can be found in various locations, and approaching them is extremely risky. However, some rewards await you if you’re curious and brave enough. Our guide has all the details to help you with this particular facet of the game.

How to destroy anomalies in The Alters – Anomalies, ALX, and Planetary Samples guide

You’ll start finding anomalies upon reaching the game’s first act. As you continue to explore the rocky crags and steep cliffsides, you’re bound to see strange phenomena in your surroundings. These objects appear as translucent, gaseous wisps that float in mid-air. However, the moment you approach them, Jan will start taking damage.

Types of anomalies

There are several types of anomalies in The Alters. The first type you’ll encounter are static. They don’t move from their spot, though you have to walk carefully to avoid them. Soon thereafter, you’ll come across anomalies that track you down, homing in on you before they explode and inflict irradiation.

Much later in the game, you’ll find even deadlier and more annoying anomalies. Some are even able to cause time dilation, which cna be a huge hassle when you’re trying to make the most out of your precious few hours on the surface.

Lastly, there’s an anomalous object known as an Interal. Compared to other anomalies, it has a bright greenish hue and it leads to a nifty reward.

Static anomalies are fairly easy to avoid since you can go through the gaps in between them.

How to craft the Luminator

When you first stumble upon an anomaly, you’ll be able to speak with Jan Scientist, who’s quite curious about these peculiar entities. Then, when you chance upon an Interal, you can talk to Jan Scientist once more. Doing so allows you to craft a Luminator, which requires 20x metals and 20x rapidium.

Talking to the Scientist unlocks a means of crafting the Luminator.

How to destroy anomalies to obtain ALX

The Luminator is essentially a flashlight that can eliminate anomalies in The Alters. If you’ve played the Alan Wake games before, then it’s akin to shining a light on the darkness nodes to make them explode.

In any case, you can select the Luminator via the item/action wheel. Then, shine a light while aiming at the anomaly’s bright core. Eventually, the core will burst open, allowing you to pick up a resource called ALX.

Note 1: After researching the corresponding techs, you can turn ALX into other resources via the Refinery.

Note 2: The Luminator gradually expends Suit Energy whenever you’re shining the light on a target. You can either bring some extra Suit Batteries or recharge your energy via outposts.

Continuously shine the light on an anomaly’s core to blast it.

How to destroy Interal Cores to obtain Planetary Samples

Let’s go back to what we mentioned earlier regarding Interals. These greenish wisps can also be destroyed using the Luminator. The difference is that doing so reveals luminescent patches of grass and flowers. You then need to follow these lush growths to where they lead.

Eventually, you’ll come across an Interal Vein Core. Activate the Luminator once more to blast the core so you can pick up a special item known as a Planetary Sample.

The Planetary Sample in The Alters can be used to unlock higher-tier techs in the Research Lab. These include suit upgrades, more advanced outposts, and better craftable tools.

Planetary Samples from Interal Vein Cores are quite valuable.

Note: If you decide to dawdle longer in a region until the sun gets dangerously close, it will trigger the “High Planetary Activity” state. It’s possible to find another Interal Vein in another location in the region, which means you can obtain an extra Planetary Sample.

That does it for our guide on how to destroy anomalies in The Alters. If you want to get ready for other threats that you’d encounter on your adventure, then we advise you to read our Magnetic Storms guide.

Can you help Jan Dolski and his clones stay alive throughout their ordeal? Well, if you need more tips, you can head over to our The Alters guides hub.



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How To Manage Your Base In The Alters
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How To Manage Your Base In The Alters

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Are you thinking about how to manage your base in The Alters? This large structure acts as your mobile hub throughout the campaign. While the environment outside already has potential threats, you still need to be mindful of what happens inside your home away from home. Our guide has several tips to aid you with this particular facet of the game.

How to manage your base in The Alters – Base building and modules guide

Once you have access to your mobile base, you’ll notice that several modules/rooms are already active. As you progress further into the campaign, though, you have to focus on what you can add to your hub. This is done via the terminal in the Command Center.

  • Build – The build button allows you to add new modules/rooms.
  • Expand – The expand button increases the available space in your hub, allowing you to plop down more modules.

These actions require all sorts of resources that you can find on the planet, including metals, minerals, organics, and even rarer byproducts from anomalies. Some can be obtained by hand, while others require you to scan and mine deep deposits.

Note: You can recheck the layout of your hub at any time by opening the Base Overview screen.

How to place down new rooms and modules

The Alters’ base building screen in the Command Center lets you organize and reposition modules/rooms as you see fit. You may also refund the cost of a room if you no longer need it. However, you should look at how each module is connected–i.e. all rooms need to have a green outline, which means there’s a path that leads to them.

Please note that not all rooms are available at the start. Several can only be unlocked once you’ve completed the research task in the Lab.

You can make changes to your base’s layout in the Command Center.

The most integral rooms for your base

If you want to manage your base in The Alters, then you should take note of the functions of each room. Modules like the Airlock (i.e. where you enter/exit your base), Captain’s Cabin (i.e. where you sleep), Communication Room (i.e. where you make calls), Command Center (i.e. where you rearrange rooms), and Elevators are, naturally, integral throughout your run. Other modules also offer unique functions:

  • Research Lab – Allows you to unlock and research techs once you have a Scientist.
  • Workshop – Lets you craft tools and consumables. You can have more than one Workshop in your hub.
  • Quantum Computer and The Womb – These modules let you examine Jan’s life paths to “birth” new clones.
  • Machinery – Needs to have a Radiation Filter activated at night or during Magnetic Storms. This prevents Jan and his alters from suffering from radiation sickness.
  • Infirmary – Jan and his clones can recover from injuries and radiation sickness. If you already have a Doctor, then the recovery speed of characters also increases.
  • Greenhouse and Kitchen – The former is used to grow crops, while the latter is used to cook food. Your food can either come from organics or from the crops that you’ve cultivated. Likewise, each character consumes one meal per day, so you should always have more than enough to go by.
  • Dormitory – This is where your alter clones sleep. You should have one in place to improve conditions in your hub.
  • Recreation: Social Room and Gym – Your alters can relax or exercise to help with their motivation.
  • Contemplation Room – This is where alters go if they feel unmotivated or dejected. The Shrink will be able to counsel them, whereas the Guard will be able to discipline them.
  • Storage – The number and size of Storage rooms you have also increases the amount of resources that your base can hold. You don’t need a lot of these early on, as four or five tend to be enough. That said, any excess resources that are gathered will be lost if there is no space available.
  • Recycler – Once researched, this module nets you +5 organics per day depending on the number of people in your base.

How to rearrange modules in your base

A few hours into the campaign, you should take some time to properly manage your base in The Alters. Ideally, you should look at the layout of your hub so you can reposition everything according to your needs. Here are our recommendations:

  • Airlock – Use the Airlock as the central fixture since this is where you spawn in whenever you fast travel back to your base.
  • Elevators – From the Airlock, one elevator shaft should span the entirety of the base from top to bottom. We believe this is preferable to the default configuration, which requires navigating two separate shafts.
  • Command Center, Workshop, Research Lab, and Communication Room – These should be fairly close to the Airlock and main elevator shaft due to how often you’d revisit these areas.
  • Quantum Computer and The Womb – Both should be adjacent to one another as they’re related to birthing new alters.
  • Kitchen, Dormitory, and other recreational spaces – Alters tend to hang out and rest in these rooms, so it’s a good idea to have them close to each other in case new dialogue options appear.
  • Machinery – Just remember to always have extra Radiation Filters that are active. You can also “uphold” a certain number of these so you don’t have to worry about last-minute crafting.
  • Storage – You can leave these near the bottom of the hub.

Note: You don’t need to go to each production-related room if you just want to add a craftable item to the queue. Instead, you can do this via the Production menu, before having an alter complete the task via the Assignments menu. However, if you want to manually craft the items yourself, then you have to visit these rooms.

Reconfigure and reposition modules so that it’s easier to navigate the interior of your base.

Base Navigation System: Structures and mass

Progression throughout the campaign entails moving your base before the burning sun scorches everything around you. Here’s a quick summary:

  • The Base Navigation System tells you all the information that you need. This can be accessed via the panel at the right-hand side of the Command Center.
  • Every structure/module that you add increases the total mass of your base.
  • Moving your base to a new region–which also causes the story to advance to the next chapter–requires two things:
    • You must complete the main objectives in the chapter/region.
    • The amount of organics resource that you have in your storage is equivalent to the total mass of your base. For example, if your base’s mass is 300, then you must have 300 organics.

In the end, you have to decide when to have more modules. You can have a lot of modules early so you can make use of their functions, but you should also consider how this would affect the total mass and the organics that you still have to mine.

That does it for our guide on how to manage your base in The Alters. Since we’re already talking about what goes on in your mobile habitat, then we might as well discuss how to increase the happiness of your characters. You can also check our beginner’s guide for more survival tips.

Can you help Jan Dolski and his clones stay alive throughout their ordeal? Well, if you need more tips, you can head over to our The Alters guides hub.



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The Alters - Guides Hub
Game Updates

The Alters – Guides Hub

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A strange world awaits you in The Alters. As Jan Dolski, you have to do everything in your power to make it back home. Fortunately, you can lend yourself a helping hand. By that, we mean that Jan can create clones of himself, each with his own dispositions and attitudes, to aid him on his journey. Of course, things get more convoluted down the line, which is why we have our The Alters guides hub to prepare you for the task at hand.

The Alters guides hub

Beginner’s guide: 12 tips to help you survive – The Alters is a sci-fi survival game, with key features that involve base building and management. Not only do you need to keep track of your clones and whatever it is that they’re doing, but you also have to gather lots of resources, keep your base functioning, handle key objectives, and avoid otherworldly threats in the region. Our beginner’s guide has a bunch of tips to help you get started.

Base-building and management guide – Your mobile hub can have several modules and rooms, each with a unique function. Still, you have to be mindful of the available space, the total mass, and the materials that you need to construct these improvements. Additionally, you have to consider the jobs that your alter buddies can do.

How to scan and mine for resources – This guide for The Alters focuses on a very basic task. That said, the materials that you gather, including metals, organics, minerals, and rapidium, are necessary for crafting and progression.

How to increase character happiness and morale – As Jan Dolski, the copies and clones you create have their own set of beliefs and motivations. They even have their own backstories and life paths. Naturally, you have to keep them happy by finding out what makes them tick and completing the tasks they have for you. Of course, if you can’t keep them happy, then you can always keep them in line.

How to destroy Anomalies – These peculiar entities pop up all over the planet. Some are pulsating wisps that stay in place, while others follow you around before exploding. There are even variants that affect time, which can be deadly when you’re far away from your base. The good news is that there’s a device that can destroy these anomalies. In fact, blasting these things nets you unique resources as well.

How to weather Magnetic Storms – In The Alters, you’re not just moving your base to avoid the scorching sun. You also have to mitigate the devastating impact of Magnetic Storms. These planetary disturbances occur periodically, and they can easily wreck your entire base. You need to be well-prepared for any eventuality.

We’ll add more articles to our The Alters guides hub, so stay tuned.



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The Alters: How Long To Beat
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The Alters: How Long To Beat

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Frostpunk developer 11 Bit Studios has just released its newest game, a sci-fi adventure called The Alters. This game mixes base building with sim management and has a really engrossing story about self-discovery and existentialism. It follows Jan Dolski as he crashlands and gets stranded on a planet as the only survivor.

This Narrative Adventure About Doomed Teenage Dinosaurs Feels Too Real

In order to replace his lost crew members, Jan has to create clones of himself from different timelines. In one timeline, he never went to college, so this version of Jan is a mechanic. There are many different variants of Jan, including a scientist and a botanist. They all have different specialties that can keep your base running smoothly. Now, all Jan has to do is find a way home.

You can’t see everything the game offers in one playthrough, so you’ll have to do multiple playthroughs to experience everything The Alters has to offer.

How long does it take to beat The Alters?

Depending on how much time you spend building your base and talking to the different Jans, your playtime may vary. There are three acts in the game, with the third one feeling noticeably shorter, but still as exciting as the previous ones. However, if you want to be as efficient as you can and only go for the primary objectives, you’re looking at somewhere between 25-30 hours for a single playthrough.

Screenshot: 11 bit studios

During each playthrough, there are some Alters that you’re required to create, such as the scientist, but a good amount of them are optional. Choosing which Alters to bring into the world can lead to some interesting conversations between them. At one point, I had my scientist and mechanic argue about eating healthy foods and I had to choose who’s side I was on.

You’ll learn that each of these Jans are fully-fledged characters and not just cardboard copies of himself. They have vastly different personalities and it creates a sense of underlying tension that adds a personal touch to the story that elevates The Alters above other contemporary survival games.

Screenshot: 11 bit studios

It’s worth going through multiple playthroughs to see how the different Jans interact, as their different life paths can help the main Jan discover parts of himself that he didn’t realize before. I created five different Jans across my first playthrough, and it looks like there are about 10 Jan variants. So in order to create all Jans at least once, you’re looking at at minimum two playthroughs for somewhere of a total of 55-60 hours—possibly even more if you want to see the different ways the Jans can interact with each other.

The Alters is now available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

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The Alters Review - Seeing Double
Game Reviews

The Alters Review – Seeing Double

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With This War of Mine and Frostpunk, developer 11 Bit Studios has garnered a reputation for making games that force you to make challenging decisions. The Alters is a continuation of this pattern, melding a straightforward survival game with management systems designed around making tough calls. But this time, it’s not other people who will face the consequences of your decisions. Instead, The Alters forces you to confront other versions of yourself as you grapple with staying alive and keeping a small population of your clones happy. It’s an intriguing premise that delivers on the studio’s signature style, even if some of its survival systems occasionally get in the way.

You play as Jan Dolski, who wakes up on the shores of a black beach on a planet very far from home. The surroundings are dark and oppressive, with the stark red plumes of smoke from flares and cracking lightning above illuminating your way toward your only refuge; a monolithic wheel with a base suspended inside it. You are alone, and getting back home is going to require gathering a lot of resources. You do this by discovering resource deposits in the area around you, erecting a network of pylons as you explore further and further away from safety, and using it to ferry resources back.

Gallery

You need a steady supply of metals, minerals, and organics to build better tools, construct additions to your base, and produce food in order to survive. The planet might be foreign, but it has what you need to get home. The only thing that isn’t in abundance is time. As the days tick by, the sunrise creeps closer, spelling doom to anyone caught in its highly radioactive rays.

Fortunately, you’re also surrounded by an ethereal mineral known as Rapidium, which can be used to accelerate the growth of living cells. With it, and a convenient stash of your entire life’s memories in a computer, you’re able to create clones of yourself to give you a fighting chance to get back home. Mechanically, creating alters is critical for your survival. Every action you take in The Alters takes a certain amount of time to complete, which races by as you hold down a button to perform actions like mining, cooking, repairing, and more. But there are also a finite number of hours in a day, and when Jan becomes exhausted, these tasks take longer and longer to complete.

It’s impossible to do everything yourself, so your alters are created to help. You can schedule one alter to manage an organics mine during a shift, while another spends their day crafting tools and vital radiation filters at the workshop, leaving you time to further explore the planet’s surface to find better resource deposits, investigate strange alien activity, and discover solutions to navigate each obstacle preventing your mobile base from progressing forward.

The Alters presents the idea that small decisions can have pivotal impacts on the trajectory of your life, and allows you to experiment with this idea when creating clones of yourself. Each alter specializes in a different field, which makes them more effective at most jobs than the original Jan. A miner Jan harvests resources most effectively, while technician Jan can repair base modules faster than anyone else. Every one is voiced by the same actor as the original Jan, with each personality presenting with a pleasing level of seriousness and playfulness given the scenario. Voice acting does a lot of heavy lifting in story-critical moments that are conveyed through static scenes, and it’s compelling throughout.

Each of your alters can perform almost any job, but there are specific ones that only a specialist can be assigned to. Scientist Jan, for example, is the only one that can perform research into a vast array of equipment and base upgrades, which are vital for survival as your resource needs start outstripping your traditional means of production. Navigating your base over a river of lava or through a gravity distortion takes both specialized tools and lots of resources, so it’s critical to manage each day effectively to ensure you can progress before the next sunrise arrives to end your journey prematurely.

This would be straightforward enough, if the alters you manufacture weren’t also occasional sources of friction. Helpful as they might be, your alters will challenge you on the decisions you made that ultimately steered your life away from what their life is, while also questioning the decisions you’re making in order to keep everyone alive. All of them share an understanding that there’s no certainty around what happens to them once they help you fulfill your mission to get home, so convincing them to give their lives to pursue it takes some clever management of its own. Their personalities dictate whether they respond well to being comforted or pushed in equal measure, while their moods determine how long they’re willing to spend on a shift each day. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time, however, so The Alters generates a lot of its engaging tension from forcing you to sweat through making tough decisions to balance both survival and the happiness of the workforce that enables it.

The stories that manifest from this tug-of-war between the needs of your crew and the needs of the mission are the most engaging ones that The Alters has to offer. Small but consistent moments of hardship accompany big, nail-biting triumphs at the end of each act, where the difference between moving on and failing can often come down to a handful of hours. There are instances, however, where decisions you made numerous days prior come back to haunt you near the climax. Some poorly spent days can put you into an unrecoverable state that will force you to reload saves and sacrifice some hours to better spend your time, which is frustrating. But it does make each victory feel hard-earned, especially with all the tough decisions and delicate micro-management you navigated along the way.

That isn’t to say that each moment in The Alters is engaging. Some days will be spent at a workbench or a mining station, holding down a button and watching the hours peel away as you complete a job you couldn’t have an alter complete for you. Exploration on the planet’s surface is required to find new spots to construct mining stations, but actually nailing down the areas where these can be placed involves tedious minigames that feel purposefully designed to waste time. Surface exploration is also governed heavily by your spacesuit’s battery, and requires you to plan your exploration around detours back to base or between mining stations to recharge it.

Gallery

The Alters light combat is also an uneven addition to surface exploration. Near-invisible enemies of different varieties populate the land around your base, with some damaging you with radiation if you pass through them, while others can dilate time and steal precious hours from your day. Early on, enemies are easy enough to carefully move around, but as you progress, they become more aggressive and increasingly more dangerous, with some able to knock you out (and waste your day) with a single misstep. You can eliminate enemies entirely with a light-emitting weapon to charge and destroy glowing orbs at their centers, which makes subsequent expeditions easier, but this is tied to the same suit battery system that already limits your overall movement around the surface. With the pressure of managing both resources and hours in the day, the addition of this battery management to exploration feels punitive and punishing, and ends up being more frustrating than engaging to overcome.

The moral dilemmas and confronting moments created by manufacturing and living with alternate versions of yourself is a captivating narrative that The Alters delivers on, creating moments of emotional and mechanical tension by balancing its various management systems atop one another. It paves the way for some nail-biting victories and memorable interactions, but is also hampered by occasional tedium and needlessly frustrating exploration that is governed too heavily by a single resource. Still, the plight of Jan Dolski and his mission to get home is one that is bound to be very different for each player of The Alters, and is a stressful adventure I won’t soon forget.



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