The Alters

Publisher: 11 Bit Studios

Developers: 11 Bit Studios

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Sometimes a game comes around that you 100% enjoy...but can't recommend in good conscience. It happens to me from time to time, but it's a rare occurrence. Sadly, 2025 has one such experience: The Alters. We'll get to why eventually, but for now, I'm going to emphasize the fact that I enjoyed this. I enjoyed The Alters so much, in fact, that it's a shoe-in for a high spot on my GOTY list...maybe...depending on how its negatives sour in my mind as the year goes on. 

You are Jan Dolski: a builder serving with a classic sci-fi mission to a distant planet. The purpose of this mission is to locate and recover a rare resource called "Rapidium." Rapidium is only a theoretical material, but it is believed to have cell-accelerating properties, making it a possible answer to world hunger or cancer. So, it's an important mission, and Jan is around for the purpose of building modules to house and serve the team in their mobile base. The mobile base is essentially a gigantic wheel with a bunch of units (sleeping areas, kitchens, etc) in the center. 

That's the context. But as you can likely infer, things don't exactly go well. The ship carrying the team to the planet breaks apart in the atmosphere, and Jan is the only survivor. And remember: Jan is just a builder. He isn't exactly equipped to run mining operations, repair the base, or equip it with any functional upgrades it might need. So, what is a guy to do?

Well, after making contact with mission control, he learns that Rapidium's cell growth accelerating properties can be combined with a top secret machine in the base called "the womb" to create clones. Through this and some other sci-fi stuff that I'll just gloss over for now, Jan resorts to creating other Jans with memories stemming from alternate life paths from the ones he took. In this way, these "Alters" can have the brains of a scientist or the know-how of a technician simply because they were created with memories that lead them to that career. They're all Jan Dolski, but with key differences. From here, Jan works together with whatever clones his journey calls for in a desperate race against time to be rescued.

Right off the bat I have to say that the titular Alters are the best part of the game. I would've never guessed in a million years that a story whose entire principal cast is different variations of the same person would have such solid character development. There's a Jan for just about every circumstance. You have scientist Jan, who speaks eloquently and has autism for some reason. You have doctor Jan, who speaks in a Texas accent and looks like he plays steel guitar in the most boring Iron and Wine-esque college girl folk band you can imagine. You have botanist Jan, who is a bottom. And this is just a handful of the Jans you might meet! Is it a little silly that gruff old Jan could speak in entirely different accents if he went down a different path in life? Of course. But it's hardly important when the clones themselves are so fascinating. What's even more fascinating is the unpredictability of these characters, though.

When you first create an Alter, you can look at their life story, so you always have a good general idea of where their brains are at. But it's never the full picture. To give one example that spoils the arc for one character (skip to the next section if you want to be safe about it), there's a miner Jan who lost an arm in an explosion in his life path. But when you create him, he's physically a clone of you, so he still has both arms. Right off the bat, there's some weirdness with him getting used to being "whole," and that comes with a severe "reverse phantom pain" situation that more or less shows an underlying addiction to the sedatives the clones are given right after creation. If you let him keep using these sedatives, he'll end up getting injured on the job more and more, causing consistent problems. The only real hope you have in that case is to take him off the drugs, build an infirmary, and create the doctor Jan to treat the problem. If you're like me and you mess up the order of operations, however, things go differently. I took him off the meds but couldn't get the right resources to get the help he needed quick enough...so eventually I got another injury notification, and found that he had cut his own arm off to feel like himself again. But even this wasn't the end. With the help of the scientist, I was able to create a bionic arm for the miner that would provide a best of both worlds scenario. From here, the miner was no longer a constant hangup in the work day...but he was still a liability. Because he was a miner, I was naturally putting him in charge of mining resources outside the base during work hours, and after a while, it became clear that he was returning to base way later than expected. It turned out that when given this newfound ability to be useful, some deeply-held insecurities were making their way to the surface and he was working overtime to sate it. But when "nighttime" rolls around on this planet, radiation follows, so after a couple of days, the miner would suffer severe radiation burns and be out of commission for a day or two while he recovered. So, the next step in this story was going to be creating a therapist Jan, but I never ended up doing that, and I never ended up finishing that questline...for reasons we'll get into. But for now, just remember that this is only one version of Jan, and that while these little quirks make sense given his life path, they couldn't possibly have been inferred beforehand.

So that's the backdrop for The Alters, now let's discuss things on a more moment-to-moment level...as best as possible. From a gameplay perspective, this is mainly a management simulator in which you play a more active role than in other management sims. 

To start out on a high level view, The Alters works on a day-to-day system. You wake up at 7am and do stuff until 8pm. Or you keep going until 11pm at the cost of being tired the next day. Or you keep going even longer at the cost of being even more tired the next day. Either way, you get the gist. You clearly have a limited amount of time in a given day, with roughly one real-world second translating to one in-game minute, so success is all about using that time wisely. But this isn't the only ticking clock element. This is a planet with infrequent sunrises, and when sunrises occur, it's an extinction-level radiation blast to everything it touches. So, each chapter presents you with a problem that prevents the base from moving, and your goal is to solve that problem (through the means we'll be discussing soon) so the base can continue to move to another side of the planet where the sunrise is further away. 

Your base stores various types of resources: metals, minerals, rapidium, and organics. There are also things like enriched metals and a unique alien resource, but I'll let those go undiscussed for the purposes of this review. These resources are used for crafting things like additional base modules, mining tools, food, etc. Every objective you have centers around crafting some tool or base module, so the primary gameplay loop here involves gathering these resources. 

There are a couple ways of going about this. Firstly, there's tiny little pieces of each resource on the ground sometimes. Picking one of these up will typically net you around 3 of that resource. Then, there's "shallow" veins. These are basically deposits of a resource that jut out of the ground. I never took an exact count of the amounts these veins will yield, but from context you can likely determine that it's a bit on the higher end. Both of these avenues are, however, limited supplies. The last avenue is "deep" veins, which are denoted by, as the name implies, vein-like lines across the ground. Mining these are a bit more involved, but there's no limit to the yield you can get out of them. 

First, you need to craft a mining outpost and pylons. These cost metal to craft, so if you have no metals, you need to look for either a small deposit or a shallow vein to get started. Then, after locating the deepest source of the material in the deep vein, you place the mining outpost and line up pylons leading back to the base. From here, you can operate the outpost to draw up as many pieces of metal/minerals/rapidium/organics as you can. The items you need to get the base moving again in each chapter require x amount of materials and sometimes require the building of new modules that also require x amount of materials, so it's a consistent "spend money to make money" kind of scenario that you have to manage. Things are, of course, more complicated than I've made them out to be, but I think that's a decent overview.

In addition to the whole resource thing, you also have to manage your alters. There are a variety of work areas across the base that alters can inhabit. You can assign one to the workshop to, say, start building a mining outpost while you're on your way to a deep vein you found the previous day. You can also assign alters to work at the mining outposts to passively generate materials while you work on other things. There's no way you can possibly do everything yourself, so success revolves around not only setting things up efficiently, but also managing your staff to their fullest capacity.

Now, that's an overview of the objective facts of gameplay, how about the fun factor? Well, it kind of depends on how well you do. If you don't quite click with the intricacies of the management aspect, then things get really fussy really fast. You'll get hounded about running low on food, radiation filters, repair kits, storage space, everything seemingly one after the other. As I said, this largely depends on how well you manage things...but how well are you going to be managing things on a first playthrough, realistically? 

For the vast majority of people, I'd say, you're going to get nagged incessantly and berated by your staff for things you don't 100% feel are your fault. I honestly felt like putting the game down for a good portion of act 1 because if I wanted to deal with something like that, I would just go back to my old job. Still, the potential of the story kept me trudging along, and I'm glad I did. 

Up to this point, I haven't yet mentioned the magnetic storms. Once or twice a chapter, the base will have to weather a magnetic storm that wreaks havoc on all systems. Radiation filters will get eaten through twice as fast and modules will require maintenance much more frequently, resulting in a greater need for supplies...and if you're ill-prepared for these storms, you're going to feel it. The first magnetic storm will wreck your opinion of The Alters, but just like with the fussiness, I think you'll enjoy yourself if you can hunker through it. Getting better at the game does, as I've said, help things. And it got to the point where I was about to be going into a magnetic storm, and instead of dread, I felt this slightly anxious sense of "bring it on." That's ultimately what will keep a person going on the gameplay front, in spite of how frustrating things can get early on. 

The fact of the matter is that I feel like the difficulty is in the wrong place. The first act is by far harder than the others, and while this did give me a sense that I was doing well, it obviously had negative repercussions on my opinion of the game. I realize that this might sound like my reasoning for not actually recommending The Alters, but it isn't...if you can believe it.

If I had to level one more complaint at gameplay, I'd say that I would've liked to see a job queueing system for the alters. You can queue up a bunch of projects at the workshop or at the refinery or whatever, and whoever is assigned to those stations will go through them and suggest another place to work once they're done. But I think it would've been much better to simply be able to say "once you're done in the workshop, move on to the refinery" when assigning the day's work. The game is already pretty menu-heavy, and having to go in and manually reassign an alter if the next job they suggest isn't the one you want can really interrupt the flow of things. 

So there are some gameplay woes, but they aren't really the problem here. Rather, the problem is a combination of some design choices and the game's technical state. Simply put, not even The Last of Us: Part II made me as angry as The Alters did.

There are several small-to-medium bugs. Elevators will suddenly stop moving between base levels correctly. You'll sometimes climb a ledge and get stuck on the edge of it, rendering you unable to move until you retry again and again and get lucky...and some of these ledges require a bar of suit battery to be used, meaning that if you aren't lucky, you'll sometimes just be SOL on climbing a particular ledge. There was one point where my alters were plotting a rebellion and demanded that I build them a dormitory to sleep in....a demand that they made within the dormitory I'd already built them. This particular bug went away, however, because of the major problem, which we'll get to in a second. But before I get to that one, the last bug I want to mention is a somewhat-consistent game-breaking bug that occurs towards the end of act 2. The game would freeze up at a random point within three to five minutes of the last checkpoint. Sometimes it would be because I picked a specific line of dialogue, so I avoided picking that one, but other times it would just happen at random. I turned the console off and on again, I reinstalled the game, I quit out and restarted, just about every IT tactic under the sun, but nothing worked. I thought about quitting right then and there, but as I've already said, something about The Alters kept me coming back, and I eventually made it through this issue...though I have no idea how. 

All of that would've been enough for a full point off the final score, but it isn't even the worst part. As I implied, the worst part is a combination of technical fidelity and design choices, and it all culminates into the worst possible place for a game to fall apart: the ending. I played the final push of The Alters FIVE times. Why? Glad you asked.

For a bit of backstory without spoilers, the final push sees you embarking on a one-man quest while your staff stays behind to maintain the base during an event even worse than a magnetic storm. So you're incentivized to stock up on radiation filters, repair kits, and suit batteries for this reason. 

In the first attempt, I had more than enough of the first two, but ran out of suit batteries and had to start over. That one is on me. This attempt happened with three days until sunrise.

The second time, I decided I was going to be more prepared than that and continued preparing until there was 1 day until sunrise. I figured this would be a super tense way to end things. In this attempt, I got all the way through the final push and was thrilled! But then I got a new objective: to gather the alters in the kitchen "in the morning." In the morning the sunrise would be there. So I died, and that was the end. That one was not on me. A point of no return is a point of no return, and this was an unreasonable design choice.

For the third attempt, I started the final push with three days left, having spent less time on base resources and more time on suit batteries. I got through the final push, gathered the alters in the kitchen (two days left at that point), and realized I had a handful of extra objectives I had to do before I reached the end. So I got started as soon as I could...and had a game-breaking bug happen in which the camera no longer moved. So that attempt at reaching the end was finished because The Alters simply isn't a polished product. 

The fourth attempt I did everything the same, with three days left, and the final objectives turned out to be much more resource intensive than I imagined...after all, you're incentivized to be as prepared as possible, so why would one have resources left over after crafting all their preparations? And so, the remaining days passed, and we all died.

At that point, I came close to breaking my controller. Nothing has ever done that to me before. So I stopped for the evening and decided I was likely going to give this the "strongest" 0/10 I could manage. If something isn't completable, that's a 0/10 for me. But I knew that anger would pass, so I just took a step away and resolved to see how I felt the next day.

Sure enough, the next day, that part of me that had kept me going this whole time reared its head again, and I decided I would give it one last chance. This time I started a week before sunrise, abandoned the heartwarming side quests I'd been doing at that point, and did it all again. This time everything went smoothly, and I reached the credits.........

Except the game chose a different ending than the one I specifically chose. I'd done all the prep work to get one ending, and the game just decided that I'd chosen a different option. So even in my first successful attempt (out of FIVE) to beat this game, the lack of polish reared its ugly head right at the finish line. 

The fact is that there needed to be a more obvious "here's where you need to start" message. It's simply unacceptable to create an artificial final push scenario just to blindside the player with a circumstance in which they can still fail after the fact.

I think it's entirely possible that the team at 11 Bit Studios will patch out some of these issues as time goes on, but the damage is already done as far as I'm concerned. And in spite of that, you know what's funny? I've started a second playthrough. I kid you not. That's the power of The Alters' unique je nous se qua. There have been many games that I love that I can't really recommend. Maneater is a good example. Enotria: The Last Song is a more recent one. But there's never been a game I enjoyed as much as The Alters that also made me as mad as The Alters did. I'd say it all boils down to your patience, as patience really is the key from start to finish. Whether it's during the initial fussiness of the resource systems or the potential frustration.of the game's spaghetti code falling apart right at the very end, this is a game that is likely to test you in ways you may not enjoy. But The Alters strikes me a lot like my high school orchestra teacher. He was kind of an asshole to just about everyone, but he was the kind of person you had to get, for lack of a better word. If you got him, then there was an appreciation that followed. I got this game, but your mileage may vary. And as for GOTY status...it can't win, but the jury is still out on eligibility for the top 10 list. So, there you have it. This Mr. Hill of games captured my heart both in the positive metaphorical sense and in the literal clogging my arteries sense.

Let us review:

Initial fussiness - 1.0

Game-breaking bugs - 1.0

Endgame frustration - 1.0

The final score for The Alters is...

7.0/10 - Good

You got lucky, 11 Bit Studios, you got lucky.