Finally, someone who is creating something that isn't short format video... or really fucking long format video.
Reading what you have here has been wonderful. Thank you!
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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I overheard someone talking about this weird sci-fi cloning space game with survival/crafting/base building elements a few days ago. It sounded so unique, preposterous, and yet intriguing. I had to track it down and check it out.
The Alters is a game about being the sole survivor of a space mission. You are stranded on a dangerous planet and are forced to create clones of yourself - with an altered past - to assist with various specialized roles around your base.
It reminded me a bit of The Invincible, another game about being stranded on an alien planet and trying to escape. Except that game is more of a story-rich walking simulator, while this one actually has you collecting resources and building as you go to ensure your survival.
Also, I want to point out that this game looks incredible in 4K with maxed out graphics settings. So much detail was put into this world! I wish I had 4K video to show the rainfall and the ocean crashing against the beach. Screenshots don't do it justice.
The Alters opens with your character, Jan Dolski, crawling out of an escape pod on a dark planet. It's perpetually raining on this planet. He notices the emergency flare near his pod and sets out to find other crew members by searching for their flares.
He finds the captain's pod intact, but she's dead in her pod. Several other pods can be located nearby, but despite all being intact, they all hold deceased crew members. Jan discovers he's all alone and sets out for the nearby mobile base. It looks like a massive tire with shipping containers arranged inside of it.
All of a sudden, a radioactive wave hits! Jan has limited time to get to the shelter of the mobile base!
Once inside, your view changes to a sort of 3D side-scroller. You can walk around the various interconnected rooms of the base, or you can switch to a base overview mode, which is a cutaway view of all the rooms.
You need to get to the Communication Room to call for help, but you can't currently use the elevator for... reasons. The game teaches you how to rearrange the rooms from the Command Center. I brought the Communications Room down to my floor so I could just walk across to it.
Once there, Jan answers a call, only to get a garbled message from the distant end. They seem able to hear him, but Jan is only getting partial transmissions. The words "imminent danger" catch his ears, and he surmises from the jumbled communication that he has until sunrise in 9 days before he's burnt to a crisp by a nearby star. So now we're on a time limit!
He retreats to the captain's cabin to read the logs for his next steps, then goes to sleep for the night.
I should mention that there is a limited time to be active each day, as you can see in the bottom left of the screen. I definitely wasted a few days wandering around, trying to get familiar with the local area and the mechanics of the game. I'll probably be more streamlined on my next playthrough.
The next day, Jan sets out to find shallow deposits, as there is a shortage of metals on the mobile base. You can track them down by their red glowing light.
When you get enough metals, you can create a Workshop room, where you can craft items.
The first thing you need to craft are scanners. You're looking for organic deposits, which present themselves as blue smoke coming out of the rocky surface. When you find an area like this, you place down several scanners in a square to help scan underground for the best place to drop a mining outpost.
You want to identify the darkest red area underground. I had to make 3 separate scans of the area to find it. Fortunately, you can individually pick up and move your scanners and it will leave the previously scanned area visible.
Once you've dropped a mining outpost, you then need to run pylons all the way back to your mobile base to transfer the organic deposits to your fuel reserves.
I had flashbacks of running transmitter nodes in Deep Rock Galactic while placing all these pylons.
While exploring, I also stumbled across a strange glowing area that made the region fuzzy and streaked. You can see, even on the ground near me, it looks like it's been smeared upward with a giant paintbrush.
This is Rapidium, a plot-centric mineral you need to harvest. Extract a sample and get it back to your base!
You receive a new call from your mysterious garbled connection. You mention the Rapidium, which gets them very excited. They insist you test it to verify it's real. You're sent blueprints to create a new room called "The Womb," along with a DNA sample to test the Rapidium on. You set it up and out pops...
Rapidium, it turns out, was the resource you were sent to find on this expedition. It's an incredibly rare resource that, in theory, can rapidly age an organic item. By combining it with sheep DNA, out pops a cloned adult sheep! Jan names her Molly.
Incidentally, the name of this expedition is "Project Dolly." In real-life history, Dolly was the name of the first cloned sheep. So, a very apropos name for this game's expedition.
By now, the waterfront valley you're located in has (ideally) been picked clean of resources and your mobile base is fully fueled. It's time to get it moving! You go to the Command Center and attempt to start up the engines, but they fail to start. You reset the machinery and try again, which causes a catastrophic failure!
Not knowing what to do, you turn to your garbled friend for help. They mention something about Rapidium being able to save you, and they direct you to check out the data in the base's Quantum Computer. They give you the captain's access and you log in... to find "mind records" of all the crew.
It maps out memories of the major life events of Jan, from his childhood, leading up to his joining of the Project Dolly expedition in his 30s. You can click on each life event and read up about his past.
In the Communications Room, the distant contact suggests using this life data on Jan to create an "alter" with a branching past. The Quantum Computer pinpoints a branching life path in his childhood that would lead Jan to join Project Dolly as a technician, then simulates a fake memory path leading to that end result.
The Womb starts churning, and before you know it, out pops a clone of Jan! Except he's a bit more rough around the edges.
I noticed he has a "03" on his clothing. Jan has a "01" on his suit. What happened to "02?"
"Jan Technician," as he's known in the subtitles, is not happy to discover that he's a clone with fake memories of a life that never happened. He begrudgingly helps you get the base's engine working, but he doesn't want anything else to do with you.
You get a new menu to track your alters. It's important to be aware of their emotional status and keep them happy, as they'll perform poorly if they're in a bad mood. While you're talking with them, you'll occasionally get emotional state clouds pop up behind them. If they're red, they're negative. If they're green, they're positive.
With the engine working, you start up a journey. The mobile base goes on autopilot, heading toward a better pick-up location for your eventual rescue. Meanwhile, you repair the communications (because Jan Technician refuses to help) and you're finally able to speak clearly with someone! Your distant contact is named Lucas Peña and he's fascinated with the results of the Rapidium branching.
When you mention that your clone isn't talking to you, Lucas suggests bonding over a shared memory. I went and convinced him to make pierogi with me, just like Mom used to make!
In a much better mood, Jan Technician informs you that this mobile base is a beast to operate, and the only way the two of you are going to survive is if you make more versions of you. You'll make branching memories to create alters who end up as scientists, botanists, refiners, miners, and doctors, to name a few.
It will quickly get crowded in the mobile base and you'll have to upgrade the size of the base and create more rooms to house all the resources and people that you bring into the world.
I played for 3 hours and only barely finished the prologue! Granted, I took my time and explored everything. By the time Act 1 was starting, I was already on Day 7 of my 10 days until sunrise. So I bet I'm likely to die soon and will have to be more efficient with my next playthrough.
Or who knows where the plot will go; maybe I'll be able to survive the sunrise somehow and get more time to build and expand my army of clones. It seems like too short of a timeline for how story-rich the gameplay is. If you've played this game, let me know how much you enjoy it! I'm excited to play more and find out where the plot leads.
Thank you! I enjoy discussing video games (and movies, but my movie review blog has been abandoned for the past couple years), and I've always wanted to find someone who goes into a little depth on games; someone who introduces people to the premise of a game and gets them interested. The little summary on Steam isn't always enough to let me know if it's going to be fun or not.
Since I couldn't find any content like that, I decided to just create it myself. I'm retired young and I got nothing else going on, so why not?
It really is a great game. The story's imaginative, the ambiance is jawdropping. And that sound design, man. It's also fairly well polished. Played it for a good while, until I could not be bothered to manage people anymore. It felt too much like a job lol. The UI is a bit clumsy too I felt, but it's awesome that the grindy bits are sped up and the game doesn't waste your time, I appreciated that. However I hated the lack of manual saving, especially in a game that sometimes crashes at inopportune moments. It also does this thing where it appears open, but it punishes you if you don't do things the way it wants you to. I'm in the "it's a difficult game" camp, but there's plenty of people who feel it's an easy game just because they did some actions differently, or timed some events at different times. Still, it's definitely worth a play.
Yeah, there definitely seems to be a story the game wants to tell, and you're punished for veering too far from the plot. I've definitely restarted a save or two to undo a bad choice.
I do like that it highlights your previous conversation choices, so you know which route you picked and could try another option in your next run. That definitely makes it a bit easier.
I'm excited to see what new alters you create and what their personalities will be like, but I'm also kind of dreading the personnel management system getting too complex.
You should write reviews as a job
Thanks! I do this as a hobby and would probably get burnt out if I had to do this for work. I attempted to make daily posts for a while as a personal writing challenge and I got to #50 before I had to take a break.
But my posting would definitely be more consistent if someone paid me to do it. 😆 I need to go back and redo the first handful of posts I've made here, since I started out just posting a single screenshot. It'd be nice to actually discuss those games in depth too.
Good point lol
No pressure to redo them, just make a new one whenever (and if ever) you play again!
Yeah, that's the plan. I'm leaving the originals alone, I'll just make a new post for those games.
I think this is made by the same studio as The Invincible.
It's published by the same studio (11 bit studios), but they each have different developers. 11 bit studios also created The Alters, but Starward Industries created The Invincible.
Ah yes correct.
Thanks for the lengty review, this game is also on my radar.
There has been a big review in the french game magazine CanardPC: they praised its originality but warned for its difficulty and "unfairness".
It can definitely seem unfair at times. I mentioned in another comment that it feels like the game has a story it wants to tell and it punishes you for straying too far from the plot. Fortunately, it marks your conversation choices, so if you have to redo conversations, you know which path you previously took.
I think 02 must be the sheep. Thank you for posting, I love your reviews! I’m taking a break from the alters currently because I ran into a bug and quit because I didn’t want to back track, only like 7-10 days but still I was bothered. I think I might try again this weekend. It is very interesting and emotionally provoking.
I think 02 must be the sheep.
Ah! That makes sense! I wondered if there was going to be some twist in the plot where the original Jan was an alter himself (the actual #2) and the real original died with the rest of the crew. But I didn't want to speculate and inadvertently spoil a good twist.
I've watched thousands of movies and TV shows and played a lot of games, and my wife gets mad at me because I'm pretty good at spotting a twist coming a mile away now. So I do my best not to speculate where the plot is going in these posts. But you're right, it might just be as simple as counting how many clones have been made.
That’s hilarious. I can relate, I’m really good at calling a conclusion from the first foreshadow.