| The Alters | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
The Alters is a survival base builder where you use clones of yourself to expand your options instead of becoming a man of the land. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
The Alters Review Overview
What is The Alters?
Players play as the everyday man, Jan Dolski, who has the impossible task of surviving on a distant planet with a moving base where the sun’s rays are dangerous and deadly in this single-player survival simulation game. Faced with tasks that he cannot handle alone, he must create alternate versions of himself to help him complete them.
The Alters features:
⚫︎ Satisfactory-like resource gathering
⚫︎ Fallout Shelter-like base building
⚫︎ Base resets after every chapter
⚫︎ Side quests for narrative and gameplay expansion
⚫︎ Tiered technology
⚫︎ Multiple chapters and maps to explore and experience
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about The Alters's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefront | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 Epic |
 GoG |
 Playstation |
 Xbox |
| Wishlist Only | $34.99 | |||
The Alters Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Every Choice Feels Heavy Low Skill Floor It Has a Weird, Wonderful World Your Clones Want to Win Too |
You’ll Never Get Attached to Your Base Low Skill Ceiling Talking To Yourself Gets Old Quick |
The Alters Overall Score - 82/100
The Alters is a survival base-builder set on a beautifully desolate planet, with gameplay that reflects that same tone—quiet, methodical, and occasionally rough around the edges. It’s far from perfect, having clearly sacrificed some base-building mechanics in favor of its narrative focus, but the overall experience remains pretty darn good. Most importantly, it’s an absolute steal for what it offers, especially when you factor in its aesthetics and solid replay value.
The Alters Story - 7/10
The Alters’ story leans on the familiar trope of a lone protagonist stranded on an alien planet. But instead of going full survivalist and roughing it solo, the game takes a bizarre yet strangely logical approach: if you don’t have enough help, just clone yourself, haha. Outside of that clever twist, the plot doesn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking—except for the surprisingly introspective moments where you’re forced to confront the differences between your life choices and those of your alternate selves, which ends up taking the bulk of its narrative highlights.
The Alters Gameplay - 8/10
If I had to boil down The Alters’ gameplay into a single line, it’d probably be something like: “a survival base builder that traded half its base-building depth for dating sim drama.” Strangely enough, it works—the emotional tension adds a refreshing layer to what’s usually a slow, grindy genre. But when half your base gets wiped at the end of every chapter, it kind of makes you wonder: what’s even the point of planning anything?
The Alters Visuals - 9/10
Before you ask—yes, you’re basically stuck on a giant mobile base surrounded by a bunch of same-faced versions of yourself, with only wardrobe choices and haircuts to tell you apart. Sure, it fits the game’s theme, but staring at your own face over and over gets old real fast. Thankfully, every level—your base included—is so beautifully designed that it’s easy to forget you're crewing up with a whole squad of alternate-yous.
The Alters Audio - 8/10
Funnily enough, there’s nothing technically wrong with The Alters’ audio—but it’s still tough to give it a high score. The novelty wears off fast, especially when the whole gimmick involves listening to yourself in various accents and emotional tones over and over again. Same goes for the sound effects: immersive at first, but once the base gets busy (as it always does), the sheer audio clutter starts to become quite grating very quickly.
The Alters Value for Money - 9/10
It’s honestly kind of shocking that a game like this is going for a dirt-cheap price of just $34.99. With how replayable the formula is, even if it does get a bit predictable after your first run, plus the high-quality visuals, audio, and a surprisingly heartfelt narrative, you’d expect this to launch at $49.99 minimum. But no, it’s priced like a sushi combo from a mid-tier restaurant, and that’s just absurdly good value.
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The Alters Review: A Successful Show of Sci-Fi Survival
Base builders are, without a doubt, some of the most dangerously addictive games out there. Whether it's Ark, Palworld, The Forest, or any of the other survival-base builder staples, there’s just something about watching your efforts materialize—digitally or otherwise—that keeps you glued to the screen. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of progress, or maybe we’re all just suckers for seeing a shack turn into a fortress.
But what most of those games tend to lack is a gripping narrative to tie the experience together. That might just be the driving philosophy behind The Alters, a narrative-heavy survival base builder set not in the middle of nowhere—but on an entire planet that’s basically been roasted alive (or, you know, dead).
To add context, you play as Jan Dolski, a lowly builder who volunteered to join an expedition alongside a team of elites on a planet scorched black by its sun. But due to plot reasons, everyone except you dies en route, leaving you alone with the massive mobile base that was supposed to be maintained by the whole team. And now you find yourself trying to outrun that sun or else get the same terminal tan as the planet itself.
In most survival games, that’s the point where you—or some radio voice—tells you to toughen up and start surviving. Cue the usual routine of chopping trees with handheld axes (or fists, if you're feeling bold) and slowly building your way up from nothing.
But The Alters isn’t your typical survival game. In this world, a miraculous material called Rapidium exists. And all you really need to know about it is that it lets you clone yourself.
Not just regular clones, either. Thanks to a quantum computer hooked into the process, the system can inject alternate life paths into your duplicates based on what you could have become. For example, maybe you could’ve become a technician if you chose not to go to college and take care of your mom? Well, it’s reality now and you’ve got a clone who knows their way around machines like it was the back of their hand.
Because let’s be honest: having a hundred of you running around clueless doesn’t do anyone any favors.
Your Clones Are Both Endearing and Annoying
You can think of your clones, the Alters, as alternate versions of yourself—basically, you, but, well, not you. It's like the game pulls from parallel timelines, except everything happens in the same reality. Naturally, they emerge disoriented, having been yanked from their “own” lives into yours, with fully formed memories thanks to the quantum computer—but zero context for the situation at hand.
They're also, crucially, not you (quick, act surprised). Even if you share DNA and a common origin up to a point, their lives have diverged drastically. The Alters leans into this to create narrative tension and emotional weight, encouraging you to think carefully before speaking to them. Conversations aren't just about small talk—they're reflections of paths not taken, layered with regret, bitterness, and occasionally, understanding.
The game makes it clear that Jan Dolski’s painful past—an abusive father, a failed marriage, job troubles—isn’t unique to him. His Alters, despite branching off in different directions, still carry some emotional baggage, some shared and some distinct (which is also shared, in that sense), creating a shared vulnerability that plays out in surprisingly intimate ways. There’s a powerful emotional payoff in seeing these versions of yourself break down—not because they’re weak, but because facing yourself can sometimes be the hardest thing to do.
That said, I do have problems with how this system is handled. Every time you speak to an Alter, there's a chance you'll tank their mood with even the most innocuous line. Sure, dialogue affecting relationships makes sense; words have weight depending on the listener, after all, but not every response should feel like a potential landmine. Why should a harmless jest make someone spiral into anxiety when it wasn’t remotely threatening?
It doesn’t happen constantly, but because it does, it injects unnecessary tension into otherwise low-stakes interactions. It turns what could be thoughtful narrative moments into social minefields, and not always in a way that feels right. Thankfully, though, they do pull their weight around the house with their specializations, allowing them to operate at a far better efficiency than you can in specific tasks such as maintenance, research, mining, refining, etc.
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Your Choices Have Gameplay Consequences
The Alters doesn’t hesitate to remind you that your survival is tied directly to how well you manage your clones. Beyond just navigating dialogue landmines, even small decisions—like swapping out their usual machine-processed breakfast slop for something halfway decent—can shift the entire mood of your crew. And yes, their mood matters. A lot.
Their emotional state has a huge impact on how they perform. A content Alter might gladly work overtime, and sometimes even share life lessons from their unique past; ones that aren’t just flavor text, but can unlock new solutions to story events. On the flip side, if they’re anxious, depressed, or just in a bad headspace, expect reduced efficiency, unresponsiveness, and even accidents—some of which can lead to permanent, avoidable deaths.
It’s a brilliant system in theory, one that turns even routine management into a strategic juggling act. But it can spiral fast—especially when campaign pressure ramps up and you barely have time to keep your team emotionally afloat, let alone individually cared for. The result? A crew that mirrors your chaos, and a game that doesn’t pull punches when it all starts to fall apart.
Gameplay is Deceptively Simple, Though
Despite the constant micromanagement required to keep your Alters content while still pushing through the game, your daily loop in The Alters generally falls into three loosely defined, often overlapping categories: exploration, survival, and Alter management.
Exploration is the most straightforward of the bunch. You leave your mobile base, soak in the hauntingly beautiful landscapes, craft whatever tools or supplies you’ll need to advance, and try not to freak out when the anomalies, The Alters’ version of hostile threats, creep up on you. They’re intentionally hard to spot unless you’re laser-focused, which means you’re basically punished for admiring the scenery. And yes, failing to spot them in time can absolutely get you a premature game over screen, which is kind of annoying since killing them—by means of focusing a flashlight on them a la Alan Wake—is also a hassle.
Oddly enough, this ends up being the most exciting part of the game—not a particularly high bar, considering the next highlight is your Alters debating whether recycled slop or soil-grown food makes for a better breakfast. Exploration is also one of the few things you can’t hand off to your Alters, alongside base construction and managing their work schedules. If you could delegate that too, well, there’d be hardly any game left to actually play.
As for the survival aspect, well...
For a Base Builder, It’s Kind of Not There
That part of The Alters is fairly straightforward, though it leans into that “mixed bag” territory. You can think of the survival and construction aspect as a weird fusion between Satisfactory’s resource automation and Fallout Shelter’s modular base design. The “base-building” isn’t really about creative planning—it’s more like solving a spatial puzzle, while the “resource gathering” is less about scavenging and more about parking yourself near a drill and holding down the E key.
Your mobile base—a giant, expandable crawler—lets you build new modules to add functionality, like a garden for food or a playroom for morale. But don’t expect freedom of placement or ergonomic layouts; the game hands you a grid, and your only concern is whether you’ve got enough squares left and whether everything connects via a corridor or elevator. It enforces organization, which has its benefits, but sacrifices almost all potential for creative expression—an unfortunate tradeoff in a genre where building often feels personal.
Things get even more rigid once you step outside. External structures follow more of a Satisfactory-like approach: mining stations for resources, teleporters to aid in traversal—useful, sure, but strictly utilitarian. There’s no horizontal sprawl, no outpost building, and definitely no visual storytelling through architecture. Mining and other maintenance work can even be left to your Alters, which just takes away the joy that some derive from the grind. Then, just as you start to settle in, the chapter ends, the game packs up your entire operation, and drops you in a new area like none of it mattered.
Narratively, it makes sense—you’re outrunning the planet’s deadly rotation. But from a gameplay perspective, it strips away any sense of permanence or attachment to what you’ve built. And that raises the big question every base builder enthusiast or enjoyer should be intimately familiar with: what’s the point? If everything resets anyway, you stop caring about layout, placement, or efficiency—and the whole system starts feeling hollow, more like busywork than actual building.
The World is Desolate, Not Deserted
As you spend your days stuck in one location thanks to whatever plot justification the game throws at you, you’ll eventually get a notification that the sun is drawing closer. This isn’t just your cue to hurry up and wrap things up; it also marks the moment when the environment begins to shift and come alive.
For most of your stay, the planet feels dead—charred black, scorched by the sun, dotted with lava rivers and not much else. Anomalies, explained as entities existing in two dimensions at once, usually remain dormant and practically invisible. But once the sun starts creeping in, everything changes: new resources emerge, terrain subtly transforms, anomalies grow in size or start acting up, and entirely new ones can appear. On top of that, your surface time gets shorter thanks to rising radiation levels.
It’s not just a standard difficulty spike—though it is that—it also breathes life into the planet in a way that feels organic, not just mechanically imposed. And the shift comes with the right amount of visual and atmospheric flair to make the escalation feel earned.
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Is The Alters Worth It?
It’s Dirt Cheap For What It Offers
Honestly, even after putting all this down in a review, I’m still kind of stunned that The Alters is being sold for just $34.99 to us gamers. That price alone would’ve had me still praising the game even if it were in a slightly rougher state than what I played.
If anything, it’d be even stronger if the devs lifted the early restrictions on creating certain types of clones just to give each run more freedom to branch in new directions. Even with only one core scenario, that kind of flexibility could push the game’s replayability through the roof.
| Digital Storefront | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
Epic |
GoG |
Playstation |
Xbox |
| Wishlist Only | $34.99 | |||
The Alters FAQ
Can The Alters die?
Yes, they can. Some of them can narrowly avoid them and come out with grievous injuries, sure, but in the worst case, they can bleed out if their wounds aren’t treated on time. Radiation is also a potentially lethal, albeit slightly more manageable risk.
Can you make outpost bases?
Not really. The most you can do is set up teleportation hubs a distance away from your mobile shelter.
Game8 Reviews
The Alters Product Information
 |
|
| Title | THE ALTERS |
|---|---|
| Release Date | June 13, 2025 |
| Developer | 11 bit studios |
| Publisher | 11 bit studios |
| Supported Platforms | PC, PlayStation, Xbox |
| Genre | Survival, Base-Builder |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | Mature |
| Official Website | The Alters Website |
