Max Payne once said, “If you had done something differently, it wouldn’t be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions.” The idea of the butterfly effect drastically changing your reality, and leaving a different reality unexplored, and a different person that looks like you, behind that door. This isn’t you, though, and central to the story of The Alters, developed by 11bit Studio, is the exploration of this, and just how drastically one life change can alter your trajectory.
The narrative of the game begins with Jan Dolski becoming the sole survivor of an ill-fated space mission to mine a faraway planet for its resources. There is fire, destruction, dead bodies, and all the while, Jan makes his way to a planetary base that is basically just a giant tire that can roll around. Jan takes on the difficult task of running the base he is stranded in, which, as you progress, you learn is a tall order for a whole crew, let alone just himself. As it turns out, when hope starts to seem lost, the shady sci-fi corporation you work for did, well, shady sci-fi corporation stuff and introduce you to the Alter’s project, which allows Jan to create a clone of himself using memories from an alternate reality version of himself, one that made the specific choices in a sea of infinite choices to be just the right helpful on your mission.
The game presents you with a massive tree of life choices that you can read through, getting a VERY in-depth lore of Jan, such as his father’s abuse of his mother, which leads to the first pivotal life choice that splits his reality between choosing to stay or leaving for college. Each one of these choices creates a him that specializes in different expertise that can be utilized to keep your base running and functional. A large amount of praise here needs to be given to Alex Jordan, who portrays the Jans, bringing a surprising amount of humanity to each as he bounces lines against himself for much of the game and still manages to keep it entertaining.
The interpersonal relationship between Jan and the Alters makes up a pivotal part of the game experience. These varying versions don’t inherently like each other, and trust needs to be earned. You can converse with each of them in private conversation, take on tasks for them to earn their trust, and make them happy, or ignore them completely if you want to. You are given dialog choices to stress the work that needs to be done over their emotional state, or try to find some common ground. The fact that impacting your crew requires actually getting to know them makes the experience far more rewarding.
An early example of this is the Miner version of Jan, who lost one arm in an accident and developed an addiction to pain meds. Since the clones create some variation of Jan’s appearance, but otherwise are direct clones, the miner is created with two hands, which he struggles with. He asks to be put on meds to numb the reverse phantom limb he feels, but these cause him to often hurt himself during tasks, which really hinders productivity. I’ll admit I let him get away with it way too long before I pulled the meds, which has its own consequences that forced me to scramble with a series of options to solve the situation. No one choice was particularly harder than the other, laying your options purely on what option you feel you can live with at the end of the day, giving decisions a lasting impact.
The crux of the experience is a survival game, though with some interesting management twists on top of it. Your base is made up of compartments of multiple shapes and sizes, and it is lacking some important ones, such as an Infirmary. The player also takes all their Alters with tasks for the day, like crafting or mining. Some variants, like the scientist, are important as they complete special tasks in their module. This loop can become a challenging micromanage as you can set the scientist to any task, which might become important as there is a lot to do, but this means you limit the ability to research necessary things like an upgrade to the ship, which gives you more space to build modules as the situation requires management of more tasks. The core task is to outrun the sun, which gives you a time frame for each area based on how close the sun is, only giving a time limit in days when it is very close by. Its proximity to your location also lessens the amount of time you can work per day, applying more pressure to the work you try to get done.
Each area in the game isn’t completely vacant, but is a series of interconnected areas on the surface of an uninhabited planet. As you wander from area to area, the goal is to find deposits of material you need that you can build a work outpost on, that then needs to be connected back yo your shit through a series ob power terminals. As you find more outposts, it becomes easier to connect them back, as all you need to do is fold your new power line into your old power line to run them back. This forms the primary loop of these areas, but there are deviations in the form of additional tasks that can be completed. In one area, you walk through a series of bizarre anomalies that send you through a series of tasks to try to discover the cause of them, and in another area, you find time dilations that cause your most precious resource, time, to flow faster, with you again tasked with ways around this. These areas have their own as you explore, such as upgrades for how many Alters you can have at a time, or movies you can watch with your staff, but these tend to be found in the luggage lying around.
Like all management sims, balancing every task you are given, especially as they start piling up, is extremely hard and frustrating. You don’t ‘die’ in the traditional sense, instead suffering a mutiny at the hands of your alters should you fail to meet their needs. Before it gets too bad, you are given a task that outlines what the game feels you need to do to avoid this, but honestly, in the three times I lost, there didn’t seem to be a correlation between what I was told and what actually happens. At one point, I was told to raise morale, which I did, only to go to bed and wake up to news of a revolt. The game auto-saves each day, and upon loss, you are given the choice to choose a day to restart on, with you being given the option to start pretty far back. The issue is, a losing run starts with extremely minor mistakes that were made one day so far back you don’t even remember. I learned that lesson in my second loss, when I only chose to restart a few days prior, thinking that was enough. This bleeds into another annoying issue as losing can then require you to replay hours worth of gameplay to undo your mistake or rebalance your resources so that when every little thing on the ship is going wrong, your filtration system stockpile running out doesn’t add to this. Thankfully, Alter’s happiness seems to reset from location to location, meaning if you’re about to get out, it might be worth risking overworking them to leave.
The game consistently throws new mechanics at you, both in the world itself as well as through the modules you unlock. One of my favorites was the social room, which I was tasked with making by one of my Alters to help with the stress of the job. What wasn’t expected was that this unlocks a beer pong mini-game and a TV you can watch movies you find with your staff. The negative of this, and a frequent issue of games with as much management intensity, is that these new concepts you need to adjust for come at you so fast and so often, you never get a point where you feel wholly confident in the task ahead of you. The game opens with a tutorial that can feel overwhelming and confusing. I myself have gotten stuck twice on just how to start triggering certain abilities. You will get the hang of this and feel much more confident with these early steps, almost always having some governing attribute over the elements that come later, but again, sometimes you have just figured something out, only for three more things to require understanding within less than an hour of gameplay. Jan had years to train for this space mission; I did not.
Verdict
The Alters can be confusing at the worst of times, with a lot of gameplay mechanics going on at once, requiring your attention constantly. When it rains, it pours, as the most likely thing to steer you towards loss is the inability to even address issues before more issues pop up. With all these issues mixing together, you still might be able to last for days in a bad situation before eventually losing, having to restart hours of gameplay, and hoping you picked a point where you can confidently avoid some of these issues so you have some breathing room. It never feels like you have enough Alters to put out every fire that erupts, which could drive you to an off-putting loss. But this isn’t to say I don’t love this game.
Your modular rolling base has so many rooms to add to it that it constantly adds new gameplay into the mix, such as movies with the boys… Uh, boy? Exploration could have stood to have a little more in the way of discovery, but that doesn’t change the fact that these barren areas are well designed and enjoyable. The constant stream of additional tasks to complete, both the personal ones for the crew and the ones added as you run across strange planetary anomalies, constantly diversifies what is asked of you and keeps the experience fresh. Just like the struggle of Jan and the Alters, the biggest issue with this game is that it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to enjoy it.
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Review For PlayStation 5, Also available for Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC
A review code was provided by 11bit Studio for the purposes of this review.
Developer: 11bit Studio
Publisher: 11bit Studio
Release Date: June 13, 2025
Good:
+Outstanding narrative and voice acting
+Great Management and Survival Gameplay
+Side Tasks carry meaningful impact
+Same Goes For Dialog Choices
+Good World Design
Bad:
-Slightly Confusing
-Issues Pile Up
-Loss Can Lead To Hours of Retreading Ground
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The Alters
