In the vast expanse of science fiction gaming, where settings sprawl across galaxies and stories wrestle with the unknown, very few titles manage to truly ground such spectacle in something deeply personal and hauntingly human. 11 bit studios, best known for their evocative, strategy-laden experiences like Frostpunk and This War of Mine, take an audacious leap with The Alters—a title that boldly reimagines not just survival on an alien planet but the meaning of self, choice, and consequence.
At its heart, The Alters is the singular tale of Jan Dolski, a builder marooned on a remote, sun-scorched world. His crewmates are gone, casualties of a journey gone catastrophically awry, and Jan’s only hope for survival lies in the impossible: cloning new versions of himself, each split off at the crossroads of different life choices. The premise blends classic sci-fi curiosity with existential introspection, asking not just “how do we survive?” but “who do we become in the struggle?”
From the very moment Jan finds shelter inside an imposing, ringed space station, the game is sharply aware of its philosophical aspirations. The station, a gleaming wheel of technology and foreboding isolation, isn’t just a hub for resources and construction—it’s a crucible in which Jan’s identity will be split, reflected, and tested. The introduction of “rapidium,” a curious material hidden on the planet’s surface, opens the door to cloning possibilities, and soon, the first true test unfolds: growing a sheep named Molly, a playful nod to Dolly, the world’s real-life cloned sheep. The lightness of this achievement is fleeting, however, as the player is quickly authorized—by the ironically soulless Ally Corporation—to apply the same quantum cloning to human subjects.
This is where The Alters transcends the traditional boundaries of resource management and base construction. Each Alter is a fragment of Jan’s potential—a miner crippled by trauma, a botanist devoted to a wife who no longer exists in this timeline, a technician with memories and motives that can both save and endanger the group. The result is a gameplay experience that’s as much about emotional logistics as it is about food rations or engineering. Decisions about which alters to create, nurture, or even sacrifice become the difference between life and existential dissolution.
The concept isn’t merely a narrative hook. It’s reflected in every facet of play. Each new clone comes with their own persistent needs, their memories sometimes at odds with Jan’s own, demanding consideration beyond the usual “who has the highest skill stat?” Dynamic relationships, complete with rivalries, loyalty, and emotional baggage, create a crew that feels wrenchingly real—forces to be reckoned with rather than mere resource nodes. Conversations around the dinner table, tense disputes in the greenhouse, or heartfelt confessions over a hasty game of beer pong are not optional flavor. They’re the backbone of your communal survival.
Modules serve dual purposes, offering both functional utility and spaces for emotional respite. A lively lounge might boost the crew’s spirits, but it also takes up precious slots that could be used for a new laboratory or expanded living quarters. Balancing these needs against a backdrop of limited resources is a relentless, satisfying challenge.
What elevates the construction element is how it’s tied to the game’s central philosophical conceit. Only certain Alters can unlock new research or perform complex tasks—a botanist to maximize food production, a doctor to stabilize the mentally wounded miner, a technician to rescue everyone from a disastrous system failure. You can’t have everyone, and no combination guarantees harmony. As such, every build decision is intrinsically laced with risk and compromise. When a crisis erupts—be it a sudden radiation leak or an altercational blow-up among the Jans—there is rarely a painless solution.
One of the game’s remarkable achievements is how it fosters genuine anxiety over these risks. A poor exploration outcome isn’t just a loss of accumulated resources but potentially a fatal blow to critical relationships back on the station. Knowing that every decision ripples across both logistics and inter-personal dynamics intensifies each moment.
Your initial choices on which Alters to create shape not only your immediate gameplay but can lock or unlock entire narrative arcs and resource strategies. It’s impossible to see every possible combination or outcome on a single run. Replayability thus emerges not from the pursuit of mechanical mastery but from curiosity: “What if I had cloned the scientist instead?” “What if I ignored the doctor this time?” The branching permutations are organic and, for the most part, avoid feeling arbitrary or gamified.
The psychological dimension is not window dressing. Each Alter’s emotional well-being can spiral in response to events, with dark consequences for both the individual and the whole crew. Touching on topics as fraught as substance abuse, trauma, depression, and suicide, the narrative does not skirt around the hard edges of collective and personal mental health. Instead, it integrates these themes with unflinching honesty—a choice that might be too intense for some, but is handled with considerably more nuance and weight than much of the genre.
While the experience scales to NVIDIA hardware, some optimizations and graphical flourishes do seem to favor AMD architecture. Potential players on different rigs should expect comparable but possibly less pronounced performance benefits.
If there’s a blemish here, it’s the requirement to preload shaders every time you launch the game—a minor inconvenience, but potentially irksome on lower-end systems or for those seeking instant immersion. This technical hiccup aside, the environmental design, atmospheric lighting, and small details of the station (from ambient stereos in the lounge to medical monitors beeping in the infirmary) combine to forge a deeply immersive environment.
The score itself is equal parts cinematic and eerily intimate, heightening the emotional beats of the story while maintaining the underlying tension that permeates every day’s activities. It’s the kind of soundtrack that lingers, enhancing both triumphant moments and crushing failures.
The Accessibility menu does provide customizable options, from font size scaling for subtitles and closed captions to adjustable UI scaling for visual impairments. Motion blur and fast-forward effects can be toggled, and effects that cause motion sickness can be lessened or removed. Key bindings are fully customizable, and camera sensitivities can be tailored to personal preference.
On the audio side, The Alters offers the ability to mute potentially copyright-infringing music, easing concerns for streamers, and includes native Twitch Support (at least on Steam). However, the lack of on-screen narration options may prove a barrier for some players. While these features represent a solid step toward broader inclusion, the restrictive economic difficulty settings and lack of narrator support indicate there’s room for continued improvement.
These themes aren’t gratuitously deployed. They are intrinsic to the very question the game poses: What happens when we are forced to confront not just who we could have been, but who we are, who we’ve failed to become, and who we need to be to survive? The Alters uses the infinite branches of Jan’s life not merely as speculative fiction, but as a metaphorical canvas on which the player can reflect on their own regrets and aspirations.
The base-building and resource management are dense and engaging, but it’s the emotional stakes—the lived-in, human stakes—that keep the player invested. Few games have managed to make the logistics of survival feel so deeply personal. The consequences of neglect or poor planning are not “game over” screens but the very real sense that you have failed your other selves.
The visual and auditory presentation is lush and effective. The unique setting, combined with the creative use of AMD technologies, provides a technical showcase that’s as enjoyable as it is high-performing—at least on a well-equipped system.
Replayability is the game’s core strength, but also a necessity; it’s impossible to experience even half of the branching possibilities in a single run, and some players may resent the requirement to repeat core loops to see the story’s breadth.
There’s also an implicit risk in the very success of The Alters’ narrative: the stronger the attachment a player forms to their crew, the deeper the sting of failure. The feeling of losing an Alter to depression, of being unable to avoid a collective meltdown, or simply of melting under the alien sun—these are not easy, cathartic losses. They are, by design, meant to linger.
Steer clear if you struggle with narrative content exploring trauma, mental health crises, substance abuse, or suicide. The Alters does not offer “safe mode” storytelling. Entering Jan’s world means wrestling with some of the most difficult parts of the human condition.
For anyone willing to navigate its emotional storm and uncompromising design, The Alters offers a science fiction odyssey unlike any other—one where the hardest challenge isn’t just surviving the alien sun, but living with the person (and persons) you’ve become.
Launched across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox PC, Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG, The Alters is also available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass at release, ensuring broad accessibility for players ready to face its remarkable, relentless vision.
Source: Windows Central 11 bit studios' The Alters changed my mind about sci-fi games
At its heart, The Alters is the singular tale of Jan Dolski, a builder marooned on a remote, sun-scorched world. His crewmates are gone, casualties of a journey gone catastrophically awry, and Jan’s only hope for survival lies in the impossible: cloning new versions of himself, each split off at the crossroads of different life choices. The premise blends classic sci-fi curiosity with existential introspection, asking not just “how do we survive?” but “who do we become in the struggle?”
From the very moment Jan finds shelter inside an imposing, ringed space station, the game is sharply aware of its philosophical aspirations. The station, a gleaming wheel of technology and foreboding isolation, isn’t just a hub for resources and construction—it’s a crucible in which Jan’s identity will be split, reflected, and tested. The introduction of “rapidium,” a curious material hidden on the planet’s surface, opens the door to cloning possibilities, and soon, the first true test unfolds: growing a sheep named Molly, a playful nod to Dolly, the world’s real-life cloned sheep. The lightness of this achievement is fleeting, however, as the player is quickly authorized—by the ironically soulless Ally Corporation—to apply the same quantum cloning to human subjects.This is where The Alters transcends the traditional boundaries of resource management and base construction. Each Alter is a fragment of Jan’s potential—a miner crippled by trauma, a botanist devoted to a wife who no longer exists in this timeline, a technician with memories and motives that can both save and endanger the group. The result is a gameplay experience that’s as much about emotional logistics as it is about food rations or engineering. Decisions about which alters to create, nurture, or even sacrifice become the difference between life and existential dissolution.
The concept isn’t merely a narrative hook. It’s reflected in every facet of play. Each new clone comes with their own persistent needs, their memories sometimes at odds with Jan’s own, demanding consideration beyond the usual “who has the highest skill stat?” Dynamic relationships, complete with rivalries, loyalty, and emotional baggage, create a crew that feels wrenchingly real—forces to be reckoned with rather than mere resource nodes. Conversations around the dinner table, tense disputes in the greenhouse, or heartfelt confessions over a hasty game of beer pong are not optional flavor. They’re the backbone of your communal survival.
The Structure of Survival: Base Building Reimagined
The Alters fuses its psychological drama with strategic, hands-on base building. The space station itself is a living entity, demanding constant attention and clever spatial engineering. Players are compelled to carefully arrange modules—dorms, greenhouses, social areas, gyms—on a modular, grid-based layout reminiscent of a three-dimensional Tetris board. There’s elegance in the restriction: only so many slots per row, only so much verticality per stack, and always the inescapable need for elevators and corridors to link it all.Modules serve dual purposes, offering both functional utility and spaces for emotional respite. A lively lounge might boost the crew’s spirits, but it also takes up precious slots that could be used for a new laboratory or expanded living quarters. Balancing these needs against a backdrop of limited resources is a relentless, satisfying challenge.
What elevates the construction element is how it’s tied to the game’s central philosophical conceit. Only certain Alters can unlock new research or perform complex tasks—a botanist to maximize food production, a doctor to stabilize the mentally wounded miner, a technician to rescue everyone from a disastrous system failure. You can’t have everyone, and no combination guarantees harmony. As such, every build decision is intrinsically laced with risk and compromise. When a crisis erupts—be it a sudden radiation leak or an altercational blow-up among the Jans—there is rarely a painless solution.
Fluid, Risk-Packed Exploration
Days unfold methodically, with Jan and his Alters rising each morning to tackle the station’s obligations. But The Alters invites and often compels the player to venture outside. The planet’s surface—alien, haunting, and lethally unpredictable—is as much a character as the station itself. There is real pleasure to be found in carefully mapping the surface for resource-rich veins or unearthing relics from the lost crew. Yet, roaming too far or for too long, especially at nightfall, brings punishing hazards; exposure can lead to radiation sickness, and a botched rescue attempt can doom not just Jan but whoever is bold (or unlucky) enough to help.One of the game’s remarkable achievements is how it fosters genuine anxiety over these risks. A poor exploration outcome isn’t just a loss of accumulated resources but potentially a fatal blow to critical relationships back on the station. Knowing that every decision ripples across both logistics and inter-personal dynamics intensifies each moment.
Cloning Mechanics: Ethics and Tactics
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of The Alters is its cloning system. Rather than simply churning out interchangeable workers, each Alter is the living sum of a life branch—from “the Jan who stayed with Lena” to “the Jan who turned down a corporate promotion.” These individuals remember their paths; their personalities and skillsets derive from these alternate pasts. The game never allows you to forget that, for each Jan you create, you’re conjuring a ghost who might harbor regret, jealousy, or a desperate need for validation.Your initial choices on which Alters to create shape not only your immediate gameplay but can lock or unlock entire narrative arcs and resource strategies. It’s impossible to see every possible combination or outcome on a single run. Replayability thus emerges not from the pursuit of mechanical mastery but from curiosity: “What if I had cloned the scientist instead?” “What if I ignored the doctor this time?” The branching permutations are organic and, for the most part, avoid feeling arbitrary or gamified.
The psychological dimension is not window dressing. Each Alter’s emotional well-being can spiral in response to events, with dark consequences for both the individual and the whole crew. Touching on topics as fraught as substance abuse, trauma, depression, and suicide, the narrative does not skirt around the hard edges of collective and personal mental health. Instead, it integrates these themes with unflinching honesty—a choice that might be too intense for some, but is handled with considerably more nuance and weight than much of the genre.
Technical Brilliance and AMD Integration
The Alters is, at launch, a visually ambitious title. On capable hardware—particularly on AMD setups, for which the game is specifically optimized—the alien planet and labyrinthine station are rendered in remarkable detail. The partnership with AMD, which leverages recent advances like FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3), empowers the game to run with stable frame rates, even at high settings and resolutions. On a system equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Radeon RX 9070, the game maintained a consistent 60fps at 1440p, even during the most visually intense sequences.While the experience scales to NVIDIA hardware, some optimizations and graphical flourishes do seem to favor AMD architecture. Potential players on different rigs should expect comparable but possibly less pronounced performance benefits.
If there’s a blemish here, it’s the requirement to preload shaders every time you launch the game—a minor inconvenience, but potentially irksome on lower-end systems or for those seeking instant immersion. This technical hiccup aside, the environmental design, atmospheric lighting, and small details of the station (from ambient stereos in the lounge to medical monitors beeping in the infirmary) combine to forge a deeply immersive environment.
Sound, Atmosphere, and Authenticity
The auditory landscape of The Alters is exceptional. Traversing different modules, players are treated to a seamless soundscape—the muffled thumps of music in the lounge, the sterile bleeps and whooshes of the medical bay, the haunting silence of the wasteland outdoors. There’s a tangible feeling of presence: the base feels inhabited, alive, mutable.The score itself is equal parts cinematic and eerily intimate, heightening the emotional beats of the story while maintaining the underlying tension that permeates every day’s activities. It’s the kind of soundtrack that lingers, enhancing both triumphant moments and crushing failures.
Accessibility: Progress, but Some Gaps Remain
While technically accomplished and rich in narrative, The Alters is not without accessibility shortcomings. The game offers two primary streams of difficulty adjustment: Action (with Easy, Moderate, and Hard) and Economy (Moderate and Hard only). This means that players struggling with the resource management aspects on Moderate have no way to ease the challenge, a restriction that feels unnecessarily rigid in light of the title’s otherwise inclusive spirit.The Accessibility menu does provide customizable options, from font size scaling for subtitles and closed captions to adjustable UI scaling for visual impairments. Motion blur and fast-forward effects can be toggled, and effects that cause motion sickness can be lessened or removed. Key bindings are fully customizable, and camera sensitivities can be tailored to personal preference.
On the audio side, The Alters offers the ability to mute potentially copyright-infringing music, easing concerns for streamers, and includes native Twitch Support (at least on Steam). However, the lack of on-screen narration options may prove a barrier for some players. While these features represent a solid step toward broader inclusion, the restrictive economic difficulty settings and lack of narrator support indicate there’s room for continued improvement.
Narrative Intensity: A Story That’s Not for Everyone
It must be stressed: The Alters is not a gentle experience. The narrative pulls no punches, often diving deeply and unflinchingly into topics like grief, self-harm, addiction, and suicide. The result is an emotional intensity rarely matched in games—one that can forge powerful bonds between player and character, but which may also be overwhelming or triggering for some.These themes aren’t gratuitously deployed. They are intrinsic to the very question the game poses: What happens when we are forced to confront not just who we could have been, but who we are, who we’ve failed to become, and who we need to be to survive? The Alters uses the infinite branches of Jan’s life not merely as speculative fiction, but as a metaphorical canvas on which the player can reflect on their own regrets and aspirations.
Strengths: Mastery in Character and Choice
What truly sets The Alters apart from the glut of space survival titles is its mastery of characterization. Each Alter is a living, evolving person; their needs, wants, and inner demons become as pressing as oxygen or food. When the Miner breaks down, or the Botanist quietly weeps for a life that never happened, the line between narrative and gameplay dissolves. Every success is communal, every loss a reflection on the fragility of self.The base-building and resource management are dense and engaging, but it’s the emotional stakes—the lived-in, human stakes—that keep the player invested. Few games have managed to make the logistics of survival feel so deeply personal. The consequences of neglect or poor planning are not “game over” screens but the very real sense that you have failed your other selves.
The visual and auditory presentation is lush and effective. The unique setting, combined with the creative use of AMD technologies, provides a technical showcase that’s as enjoyable as it is high-performing—at least on a well-equipped system.
Risks and Cautions
There are, however, limits and risks inherent in this bold approach. The relentless focus on mental health, trauma, and existential pain might prove too much for players unable or unwilling to grapple with these themes. The lack of finer difficulty control for resources might lock out those who want a more relaxed experience. And, while the technical performance is generally strong, features like shader preloading might detract for some.Replayability is the game’s core strength, but also a necessity; it’s impossible to experience even half of the branching possibilities in a single run, and some players may resent the requirement to repeat core loops to see the story’s breadth.
There’s also an implicit risk in the very success of The Alters’ narrative: the stronger the attachment a player forms to their crew, the deeper the sting of failure. The feeling of losing an Alter to depression, of being unable to avoid a collective meltdown, or simply of melting under the alien sun—these are not easy, cathartic losses. They are, by design, meant to linger.
Who Is The Alters For?
Buy The Alters if you crave science fiction that asks more than surface-level questions. If you enjoy strategy games that demand not just technical proficiency but emotional engagement, this is a must-play. The game’s challenge—mechanical and emotional—is intense, but so is the sense of achievement.Steer clear if you struggle with narrative content exploring trauma, mental health crises, substance abuse, or suicide. The Alters does not offer “safe mode” storytelling. Entering Jan’s world means wrestling with some of the most difficult parts of the human condition.
The Verdict: A New High Bar in Sci-Fi Storytelling
With The Alters, 11 bit studios have elevated their already impressive pedigree, crafting an experience that bends genre conventions and narrative expectations. This is not simply a new survival game set in space, but a sprawling, multifaceted meditation on identity, regret, and resilience. Each run tells a new story, shaped as much by what you choose to do as by what you could have done differently.For anyone willing to navigate its emotional storm and uncompromising design, The Alters offers a science fiction odyssey unlike any other—one where the hardest challenge isn’t just surviving the alien sun, but living with the person (and persons) you’ve become.
Launched across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox PC, Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG, The Alters is also available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass at release, ensuring broad accessibility for players ready to face its remarkable, relentless vision.
Source: Windows Central 11 bit studios' The Alters changed my mind about sci-fi games