The Alters Review: Cloning My Past Selves Was the Only Way to Stay Alive

It’s hard to describe exactly what kind of game The Alters is without getting into how much it surprised me. I went in thinking this would be a straightforward survival sim – gather materials, build a base, and stay alive on a hostile planet, but it turned out to be far more complicated than that. Not just in the mechanics, which are smart and layered, but in how it treats its premise. It doesn’t just give you a base to run and a checklist to tick through. It asks you to survive by cloning yourself, not for the sake of power or domination, but because you physically cannot survive alone. You need people. And the only people you have left are the versions of yourself that you didn’t become.

You start as Jan Dolski. It’s pronounced "Yon," by the way. He’s the last person alive after a mining expedition crash-lands on an uninhabitable planet. The surface is bleak, with shades of gray rock, pools of oily-looking water, and a sense of isolation that settles in quickly. The planet’s sun is deadly, and when it rises, it irradiates everything; the only way to stay alive is to keep your mobile base, a massive wheel-shaped structure with its living quarters suspended in the middle, moving ahead of the solar onslaught. That’s the pressure pushing you forward the entire time. You have a limited window to scavenge resources and get the base operational before the sun catches up. And if you fail, you fry.

In the beginning, you do it alone. Jan scavenges organic material to power his systems and feed himself. He gathers metals for construction, Rapidium for fuel, and research. You drag powerline pylons across the terrain to connect harvesters to the base. At first, the tasks are manageable. But you feel the time crunch almost immediately. Nights are radioactive, days are worse, and even though there’s no alien threat stalking you, the land itself is a hazard. Anomalies, radiation pockets that are invisible until you’re right on top of them, force you to pay close attention. Eventually, you get tools to deal with them, using a beam that targets their moving cores and reduces them to resource-yielding balls, but they evolve into stranger types that interfere with your senses or movement. So exploration never really gets easier—it just changes.

Inside the base, things shift visually and functionally. The camera pulls back to a 2.5D cross-section, to the point it reminded me a bit of XCOM’s ant farm view, but with more freedom. You run Jan through hallways, into elevators, and between rooms. You can build instantly, with no timers, and no extra cost for moving or deleting rooms, as long as you have the storage space for leftover materials. It’s modular and intuitive, but it gets disorienting fast. I found myself frequently asking, "Where did I put the lab?" or "Did I move the greenhouse again?" The zoomed-out view helps a bit, but you can't actually move while zoomed out. So eventually, I stopped rearranging so much and started memorizing room placements just to save myself the hassle.

And then comes The Womb.

That’s what it's actually called, the room where you perform the cloning. It’s unsettling, at the very least, but you need it to survive. Because Jan can’t keep the base running alone, he needs help. So you use a combination of Rapidium and a quantum computer that visualizes Jan’s memories like a branching map. The interface looks like a glowing neural network, and every fork represents a choice Jan made or didn’t make, in his life. Did he go to university or stay home? Did he leave his abusive father or confront him? Did he sell the house? Marry Lena? From these paths, you create different versions of Jan. They're called Alters.

The first one I made was Jan the Technician, from a life where he stayed home and learned to repair things. When he woke up, he wasn’t happy. He realized almost immediately that he’d been created to serve me, to help me survive, and he wasn’t okay with that. He’s confused, angry, and hurt. And I couldn’t argue with him. He’s right. I didn’t make him because I wanted company. I made him because I needed someone who could fix the base.

That’s the core of The Alters. The gameplay loop is tightly woven around this idea of self, of alternate selves, more specifically, and the story doesn’t let you ignore the ethical weight of what you’re doing. You’re not summoning skillsets. You’re summoning people. They have memories, desires, and personalities. Each one is voiced by Alex Jordan, who manages to make every single version feel like a unique person without ever making it feel like a parody. The differences are visual, too; each Jan has different clothing, hairstyles, and expressions, and those distinctions only become more meaningful the longer you spend with them.

Over the course of my 30-hour playthrough, I created six Alters. I didn’t see them all. The different paths lead to different people, and you won’t meet every variant in one run. Roles like the Scientist, are crucial for tech advancement, whereas the Doctor or the Guard are more situational. But none of them are purely mechanical as they bring their own issues into the base. Jan the Botanist missed his wife and had strong feelings about Lena, Jan Prime’s ex, who is still communicating with you from Earth. One Alter asked to speak to her, pretending to be me, which caught me off guard a little; I didn’t know whether to allow it or not. The game doesn’t often tell you the right answer.

Managing the base becomes more complex as you add more people. You build dorms so they can rest, kitchens so they can eat real food instead of processed sludge, and social rooms so they can decompress. You can play beer pong with them or gather to watch live-action sketch comedy—yes, that’s actually in the game, and it’s strangely charming. You also manage production queues. The game gives you tools to automate basic tasks like food prep or filter production using a feature called “uphold production,” which keeps quantities at a set level. It’s a smart system and essential once you’ve got five or six people running different parts of the ship.

But people aren’t machines. Alters can burn out, fall into depression, or even rebel if they’re pushed too hard or neglected. You can monitor their moods and needs through a management menu, but there’s a small but annoying limitation: it doesn’t tell you where an Alter is currently working, so I often had to exit the menu and double-check before reassigning someone. It’s a small friction point in an otherwise smooth system, but I felt it more often as my crew expanded.

The outside world doesn’t let up either. Each act takes place on a different part of the planet, and every region brings new terrain layouts and different types of anomalies. The maps are handcrafted, not procedural, and they’re compact but layered. You often have to climb, clear rubble, or unlock shortcuts using tools. The environment pushes you to explore but at your own risk. Fast travel is handled through a network of pylons that you set up yourself. It’s an elegant system that turns exploration into a network-building exercise. It also means that every mining operation, every travel node, and every upgrade is something you earned.

Storms roll in, the base gets damaged, and radiation levels spike. Sometimes you’ll have to decide whether to keep your team safe or push them out for one last resource run before everything breaks down. You’ll either make it or you won’t; I had a few moments where I barely got the base moving in time, hours from disaster, not days.

The story doesn’t unfold through big cinematic cutscenes. Instead, it’s told through voiceovers and storyboards, with Earth-side characters only ever appearing as distorted audio in transmissions. It might sound low-budget, but it works, and it also reinforces the isolation. The writing is sharp, sometimes funny, and often heavy. A few lines do repeat, especially when giving Alters sentimental items you’ve recovered from the wreckage, but the core scenes are effective and grounded. There’s even a musical performance partway through where the Jans play a song together. 

The Alters doesn't have a clear genre label. It’s a survival game, yes, but it’s also a management sim, a base builder, a branching narrative game, and something closer to an interactive character study. You’re a version of a man doing what he has to, surrounded by the versions of himself he tried to leave behind.

And yet, you need them. They’re the reason you survive. Or, depending on your choices, the reason you don’t.

There are no easy victories in The Alters. There are smart choices. Compromises. Regrets. But what sticks with me, more than the successful production chains or the mining network I set up, are the conversations. The dinner tables. The arguments in the hallways. The realization that the people I made to save my life had lives of their own, and they weren’t always okay with being part of mine.

It’s a game that demands attention, asks uncomfortable questions, and gives you systems deep enough to support the answers you come up with. There are flaws, for sure. Some mechanics feel like busy work. Some lines repeat too much. But when I think back on it, those things fade. What stays are the versions of Jan I got to know, their strengths, their pain, their presence.

The Alters doesn’t ask if you can survive. It asks who you’re willing to become in order to survive. And that’s a much harder question to answer.