11 bit studios has a serious pedigree with This War of Mine and Frostpunk 2, one strong in its narrative and the other in its gameplay. By all accounts, The Alters is a careful combination those games to be one of the best and a standout in 2025. It’s a game of personal choices and branching paths that will encourage future replays. The Alters is a game of many things: base building, survival, exploration, and a deep sci-fi narrative to all coalesce into a cohesive unit to be an unforgettable and emotional experience.
You are Jan Dolski, the sole survivor of a planetary expedition gone wrong. You work for Ally Corp, and slowly re-establish contact with them to find a way home. To make matters worse, there is a planet-scorching heat that’s impending, giving you only days to live. It’s very reminiscent of “Pitch Black”, but with dire consequences. You’ll soon amass a list of tasks to help you work towards getting home. And as you get rolling on your journey, you’ll soon realize there’s important things going on inside just as much as the outside.
The Alters takes place over three acts, and it’s storyline has multiple endings based on the decision you make. As a result of this, the game becomes replayable for you to see certain story beats played out differently.
The hook of The Alters is centered around the titular element of this game allowing you to create clones. With your crew is gone, it’s all up to you, and you, and you, you, and you. The method of creating alters is similar to DNA splicing, but having access to your life’s timeline to branch you off at different pivotal moments. Things won’t happen to the levels of “Multiplicity”, because you’re cloning from the source and not cloning clones. In time, you’ll be managing a crew of “you”, but not you. As a result, differing personalities emerging from branched versions of you will require a lot of conflict resolution. Alters take on the same first name as you, but a different surname based on profession they’re spliced – it’s somehow hilariously accurate how I would name them, if given the choice. Each opportunity to create an alter offers a specific type that will prove useful towards your survival: a scientist, a doctor, a miner, a guard, and so on. The game does well in ensuring you’re guided towards prioritizing the right ones at the right time.
From the first alter to the last, conversations will ebb and flow with different emotions. This can be somewhat controlled but what you say to which alter so that they will react with the best outcome to their mood. Oftentimes you’ll be dealing existentialism and the importance of life, and these are heavy topics. The way this game nails the science fiction and personal relationship conversations is so endearing. With new people, so too comes things that they want or need. Very quickly demands get to be overwhelming at times, but nothing that you can’t properly deal with.
Base building is similar in design to something like XCOM where there are modules that be placed anywhere, but there’s limited space to put everything. The best part is that they can be moved around at-will. This gives you a lot of flexibility and customization to make the base yours, and cozy as you navigate its spaces.
Jan will get an increasing set of tools to make and work with. First there’s a scanner to find ore deposits. Then you’ll be able to craft a grappling hook to climb cliff faces with ease. Next are drills that allow you to clear rocks blocking your path or making you take the long way around. Then there’s a luminator that puts a light in the dark. Bigger devices like mining will have to be powered by pylons that connect back to the base. The game has great feedback in ensuring you maximize their effectiveness and don’t use more pylons than necessary. All the tools are great to have, and each new one you unlock makes everything easier than the last.
In order to progress and get beyond the more complex challenges, you’ll need to establish supply lines. The aforementioned drilling is obtaining ore or other materials. The reason for your expedition was to obtain an unstable compound known as Rapidium. It has uses beyond what was ever thought, and ensuring you are mining it to be used to help get home is paramount. Each station for mining must be done manually, or you can assign alters to work them instead. Everything you collect goes into storage, and it’s a shared storage so there’s no personal inventories to manage, but you do have to ensure you have enough space for it all. You have energy when doing nearly everything, so you have to manage your time and energy well. Everyone operates on a work schedule, and when it’s quitting time they stop what they’re doing and relax until they sleep to the next day.
The Alters saves only on new days, and this can be problematic if you have to stop playing for any reason. You can simply end the day to create that save, as it doesn’t seem like there’s any consequences. But it does seem like you’re effectively wasting time as a result. I don’t see a reason why you couldn’t just manually save.
This is another game that runs on Unreal Engine 5, and aside from shader compilation, has excellent game performance. I was able to get around 130fps inside the base, and when outside it would go as low as 99fps, but would recover to something higher. This is an absolutely gorgeous game, and there’s no DLSS/FSR/XeSS or ray tracing to be found. The game operates on natural rendering and rasterization, and it’s so much better for it.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
For every challenge I was faced with, I felt like I was solving problems in equal measure. The Alters often faces existential complications and the human condition with gravity and weightlessness to allow you to laugh. You’ll be exploring, fighting for survival, or chasing a intriguing narrative, but each system feeds into the other so seamlessly, you’ll never be bored or want to leave a task unfulfilled. The Alters is science fiction at its finest, and one of the best and weirdest games of the year.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
