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It’s Easy to Forget The Alters Isn’t a AAA Game

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On June 12, 2025

If parallel timelines actually do exist, how much do your choices (regrettable or not) truly matter in the grand scheme of things? The Alters, the new sci-fi survival-management game from 11bit Studios, explores this question with a charming, hilarious and heartfelt sci-fi tale that’s equal parts Death Stranding, Mickey 17 and The Martian to create a unique tale full of friendship and cloned sheep.

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Me, Myself, and I

After a crash-landing on a far-away planet with the rest of his crew deceased, space miner Jan is forced to make the ethically-questionable choice of cloning himself to survive and make it back to Earth. Using the ship’s quantum computer to create a duplicate of himself from another timeline (in which Jan became a technician capable of repairing the ship), a new Jan is created, followed by several more as hardships and limitations arise as the identical crew of the ship make their way across a hostile planet.

Each Jan is from a timeline branching off from significant moments in Jan’s life, causing a completely new personality to form while retaining memories up to the branching point. It’s a lot to digest, not only for the newly-born clones, but for the player as well, which makes the ability to read the backstories of not only Jan, but his “alters” as well, extremely helpful when communicating with them.

On the flip side, the ship (a peculiarly-shaped self-driving wheel which contains stacked rooms that Jan and his clones wander throughout) has been pretty banged up, and with no resources surviving the crash, the only option is to scavenge them from the strange planet you’ve landed on.

Trapped On A Strange Planet

Gathering resources is done by building mining rigs in the area currently surrounding the ship, then connecting them to the ship via transport pylons. Resources are used to build new rooms, new items and tools to help the crew get off the planet. Various tools and devices are used to traverse the rugged landscape and scout out new mining locations, as well as fend off strange reality-bending enemies that come in the form of transparent floating blobs.

Each room or mining rig must be occupied in order to serve its purpose, which is where Jan and the alters come in. Each Alter is well-equipped at performing a specific kind of task (growing food in the Greenhouse, operating Mining Rigs, etc.), but there are always more tasks than there are crew to work on, so the player has to keep track of the current status of each alter and keep them assigned to the most effective task to survive.

Tales Across Galaxies and Universes

While the main gameplay loop follows Jan and his crew collecting and managing resources to build upgrades and progress to their extraction point, there’s a secondary set of gameplay in the form of a life-sim/friendship simulator, as Jan must negotiate and maintain the emotional state of his crew through dialogue options and side stories. These choices can heavily affect your crew, with some paths leading to lost limbs, depressive breakdowns and even death.

The struggles of not only Jan, but also his crew, aren’t only limited to the survival of the crew. With the branching backstories of each clone, existential and moral quandaries arise in several forms. One version of Jan lost a spouse to an oil-mining accident that never occurred in this version of reality, leading him to beg the original Jan to warn their still-living significant other of the dangers at the rig. Each side story carries emotional baggage that brings the moral and ethical discussions to the forefront.

Closing Comments:

The Alters delivers such a high-quality experience in gameplay, graphics and storytelling that it’s easy to forget that this isn’t an AAA game (or priced like one, either). Exploration and survival-management gameplay pair perfectly with the themes of death, purpose and trauma that recur throughout the plot, making for a memorable and unique adventure that keeps you on your toes at all times.