The Alters

Harrowing reflection on identity and the shadows of choice, a sci-fi survival tale where your worst enemy might be another you.

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

Wildly unpredictable but always enjoyable, The Alters is a masterclass in high-tension gaming.

Have you ever wondered how your life might have been different if you had only made other choices? If you’d agreed to go out with the weirdo in high school, would you have ended up marrying your current spouse? If you hadn’t taken a chance on moving to a new area, would you have stayed in touch with your old friends? What if you had decided to stick with that same dead-end job instead of going back to school? How vastly different would your life have been if you’d made other decisions a...

The Alters is both immense in scope and deeply introspective. 11 Bit Studios has once again found the humanist side in a genre rooted in systems and management. It's a fantastic base builder and survival sim, but what makes The Alters truly brilliant is how these systems are underlined with vulnerable, emotional moments – like holes being punctured in your space suit.

At any given time, it feels as though there are a million resources you’re falling short on, storage that’s quickly reaching capacity, and not enough hands to go around for all the work that needs to be done. Unfortunately, it was occasionally more overwhelming than it was enjoyable, even on an easier difficulty setting. Especially since half of your responsibilities are meeting the basic human needs of your team, which weirdly makes it feel like a sci-fi survival version of The Sims. Overall, the survival gameplay should be commended for feeling authentic and realistic, but I just wish it had...

The Alters is a surprisingly deep and compelling moral choice simulator, wrapped in a survival-base building game.  If you don’t start to question some of your own life choices by the end, you must be the best version of yourself – don’t forget to take care of us other alters who didn’t make as good of choices.

The Alters achieves something tense and new by merging strategy base-building with third-person exploration and a sci-fi story about cloning yourself. But repetition and complicated busywork mar the overall effect.

The Alters is an engrossing survival adventure that delicately balances captivating self-reflection and engaging base management

If you ever wanted to manage a base on a strange planet as you explore and forge ahead then The Alters is a clever game you should play.

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, i...

The Alters may not be a game that I replay straight away, but it occupies a very special place in my mind. I can’t stop thinking about its world and characters, as well as the memories I’ve created with both. It’s absolutely worth picking up, even if you’re only mildly interested in its baseline concept.