The Alters review: "More tactile and story-heavy than the Frostpunk dev's earlier games, but the fight for survival is just as fierce"

After playing This War of Mine and both Frostpunk games, to me, developer 11 Bit Studios feels most at home at the end of the world. The Alters continues this trend, but approaches it from a fresh angle. This War of Mine is a sobering survival sim where players take on the role of a group of civilians trying to survive a city under siege in a war-torn wasteland. Frostpunk and its follow-up, Frostpunk 2, are set in a harsh winter post-apocalypse where you are tasked with leading a city through a cascade of calamities.

This trio of games centers on base building and resource gathering as a top priority for survival, but the best thing about these games is that you never lose sight of what's important – the people. 11 Bit Studios always finds the humanity in the brutal fight for survival, and the studio's newest game is no different. The Alters is a sci-fi base building sim set on a distant planet where you need to create alternate versions of yourself to survive. On the surface, it may seem like a retelling of a classic sci-fi cloning story, but in reality, this copy couldn't be more different.

The Alters begins with the cinematic drama and thrill of a sci-fi blockbuster movie. Jan Dolski has crash-landed on a hostile planet to find that the rest of the crew have all died in the landing process. After scrambling past lava rivers, radiation spots, and rocky terrain, he arrives at the mission base – a giant wheel-shaped ship. But the bad news doesn't stop there. Jan soon realizes that unless he gets the base moving, the entire station will be engulfed in an intense radiation wave emitted from the sun, and he'll be fried to a crisp. He can't pilot the ship without a crew; there's just too much to do for just one person. He needs more people. Faced with the threat of total annihilation, he makes a life-altering choice and decides to clone himself. For Jan, it's death or rebirth.

Using a valuable resource mined from the planet named rapidium, Jan can use a quantum computer in the base to create bodies and implant fabricated memories into them, birthing more Jans from alternative realities with different skillsets. With a whole team of specialists dead, Jan needs to rebuild that knowledge base, and with the promised rescue team (being sent by the big bad corporation that sent you here in the first place) taking their sweet time, you need to focus your attention on maintaining distance between you and the deadly sun, so getting this hulking base up and running is a priority. It's time to get to work.

It's a dramatic and gripping start to the game, and it's a high that never lapses. The Alters is more story-focused than 11 Bit's previous work, but the fight for survival is just as fierce.

Copy and Paste

Just like in 11 Bit's previous games, survival begins and ends with your shelter, and in The Alters, your base is situated in the middle of a great, hulking wheel. Gathering resources means actually going out onto the planet's harsh landscape and mining directly into its surface. My shopping list includes organics to feed us and the ship, minerals and metals to craft supplies, materials to fund my research, and rapidium to create more alters.

With various bits of gadgetry, you need to find the right location (often signified by environmental clues), then scan the surface to find an ore vein, plonk your mining machine down and then place enough tethers back the way you came to link it back to the ship. Finding a mining spot always feels like a journey, as you have to navigate the planet's surface, climbing up to ledges and blasting rocks to create pathways. It all feels super tactile.

It's a landscape of dramatic rock formations, caverns, and canyons, but this is no time to take holiday snaps. The planet is home to strange anomalies, translucent floating globules of nasty radiation that will eat through your suit, and the planet is prone to hours of intense radioactivity. You'll research and eventually craft a means to minimize these threats, but their presence gives exploring a thrilling edge.

Mining these resources is not automatic; you need someone to physically be there to work the machines. And so, in classic survival-sim fashion, with only a certain number of hours in a day, you need to decide which resources you need to prioritize. With more bodies, this becomes less of an issue, incentivizing you to clone away. But as your crew keeps growing, you'll also need to start expanding the base, building more rooms like a dormitory, a kitchen, a greenhouse, social rooms, extra storage, a laboratory, and the like. There's always a steady stream of new gadgets, base equipment, and rooms to build. Expansion means survival, but at what cost?

It wouldn't be an 11 Bit Studios game without the team throwing a crisis or two (or ten) your way. Your base is often at the mercy of magnetic storms, which will make rooms inoperable until you fix it (or assign an alter to fix it for you). These storms come with strong radiation spikes, which will test your base's shield and make it difficult to mine for resources. Thankfully, you can rise to the challenge of surviving these encounters with all the systems you have at your fingertips. Everything from managing alter job assignments, to crafting production lines, to the research tech tree, can all be accessed via a quick access menu, which acts as an all-in-one terminal for your ship.

There's also a life-saving 'uphold production' option where you can set an item to a minimum number, and it will automatically add that item to the production queue when it falls below that number. This is a God-send for resource management sickos like myself, and saves you from having to micromanage everything. Your ship is also entirely modular, so as you build more rooms, you can keep rearranging them for peak efficiency with no extra cost, another lovely perk for those of us who get a delicious dopamine boost from efficient organization but hate it when survival sims have to make us pay resources for it. These systems are perfect for when you need to act fast, and when a crisis does hit, you're ready and prepared, using all the tools and systems available right at your fingertips.

There's a lot to juggle, but everything is introduced in a way that doesn't overwhelm you. 11 Bit Studios understands how to challenge the player without drowning you in reams of tutorials, text boxes, and management systems. If you're not one for a challenge and prefer to focus on the story, you can switch up the difficulty options anytime from a menu. I bet Jan wishes he had that option on the ship.

Me, Myself and I

And then there are the alters, your diligent crew of 'you'. You can assign them tasks – mining, cooking, base maintenance – whatever you need, they'll do it. This labor pool isn't something you create instantly, but slowly over time. You can assign the alters different tasks seamlessly in the game's job menu, and when they're done with their production line, they'll ask you if you want them to hop onto something else. They're essentially the perfect workforce.

However, making copies of yourself isn't as simple as pressing 'go' and watching a machine whirl to life. It's a mind-bending process, complete with lavish visuals and music for added extra drama. Using the ship's quantum computer, you can revisit core events from Jan's life visualized as a neuron, brain-core timeline. There are branches in the timeline, visually representing times when Jan made a choice, and following each branch takes you to a different Jan 'variant'. And here's the trippy bit. You can examine big life events and choose a Jan who made different choices than Jan Prime. These life choices lead to a different Jan with different life experiences and a different skillset.

Need a scientist? Search through the timeline where Jan went to university and completed a PhD. How about a Botanist? Choose a timeline where Jan decided to follow his partner to another country and took up gardening. You can essentially craft the perfect crew, who all have a wide range of skills for you to utilize.

These alters may share the same DNA as Jan, but similarities essentially end there. Props to 11 Bit's visual design team and to Jan's actor Alex Jordan for making each Jan distinguished but also still Jan-like. The way they look, how they speak, and the words they use all contribute to their character and personality, and there are some big characters on the ship.

Managing the clones and their different personalities becomes part of ship life, assigning them jobs that use their skills, making sure they're happy by feeding them cooked meals instead of cheap sludge, and making sure they all have their own beds are some of the ways to keep them happy. You can even watch movies with them and play beer pong to keep their spirits up. In a menu, you can see their inner thoughts and feelings, like what's making them anxious or what they want. If they bicker with each other, you can break up the argument.

If alter management just ended here, it would be like playing God with a group of Sims, or making sure your Neopet gets watered and fed. But this is 11 Bit Studios, so of course, there's going to be human complications.

No I in Team Work

In The Alters, the moral implications of cloning yourself aren't lost in all the resource and base management systems. The emotional and ethical implications are felt from creating your very first Jan. The first Alter I make is Jan Technician, an alter with proficiency in base maintenance, technology, and tinkering. When he wakes up, he's understandably confused, so I explain the situation to him. The conversation quickly turns tense as he realises he's nothing more than a tool, a means for you, Jan Prime, to survive – and he's right. He's pissed, and his anger is absolutely justified.

This isn't a story beat that slowly gets revealed over time as the alters realize why they were created, but a head-on breach of the topic. You are immediately confronted with the reality of your decision. The game wants you to understand that the alters are more than just your labor force, they're people with experiences and memories – even if they're simulated. Jan Technician decided to stand up to his abusive father, whereas Jan Prime left for university and never looked back. There's tension between the two men upon realizing this, and it quickly becomes apparent how someone so close to you can also simultaneously feel so far away.

Jan Prime and Jan Technician eventually find common ground, but this underlying tension remains as more moral and ethical dilemmas keep revealing themselves. Another Alter – Jan Botanist – misses his wife, and it turns out he's from a timeline where Jan managed to work things out with his ex, Lena. Jan Prime and she are still in contact (she works for the big bad evil corp), and when Jan Botanist finds out, he encourages Jan to get in touch with his emotions and to reconnect with her, and even asks that he could pretend to be Jan Prime and speak to her in his behalf. Uhhh, should I let him speak with her? Is it a good idea to try and rekindle what Jan Prime and Lena lost?

You help them, but they also help you in return. These alters have needs and desires, making them constantly part of your story. During my first playthrough, I created five different alters, all of whom I got to know pretty well. They're not just empty shells, but people with their own traumas from their lives, like addiction, family deaths, and financial struggles. Each person is a collection of choices and different life paths. Making connections with each of them is more than just keeping them happy, so they work better – they're fascinating reflections of your different life choices. Chatting with them makes you reflect on your own decisions. I can't help thinking: What would my alters look like?

Many of the game's choices aren't just about survival, they're also about making decisions that affect you and your crew. This War of Mine and Frostpunk, and now The Alters demand that you make tough choices, the scrappy need to survive outweighing the needs of those around you. But in The Alters, all these people are different versions of you. What are you willing to sacrifice then?

The Alters reaffirms what 11 Bit Studios has been communicating for years, that human nature can be used to tell a meaningful story and ask meaningful questions. Instead of looking at the bigger picture, 11 Bit instead asks you to look smaller. The Alters is a fantastic base builder and survival sim, but what makes it truly brilliant is how these systems are underlined with emotional moments, a branching story, difficult choices, and thrilling challenges. It's an introspective story about self-discovery and self-actualization, a gooey, beating heart inside a brilliant machine.

Still looking to make it? Check out our best survival games list!