The Alters Reviews
11 Bit Studios delivers its best project to date with The Alters. Become the humble builder Jan Dolski and survive on an extreme planet while fleeing the dawn. Exploration, action, decisions, management, and strategy are the keys to a title that cleverly blends various components, giving the experience a very original touch. Play with the fabric of time, manipulate the universe at quantum levels, and perform scientific magic as you try to keep your crew alive and return home safely
Review in Spanish | Read full review
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with The Alters, especially thanks to its blend of gameplay styles and variety of mysteries throughout. If you relate to the protagonist then it'll be a much better experience for you but keep in mind that not everyone will. 👨🚀
The Alters is a masterfully crafted experience that elevates survival gaming into something genuinely meaningful and emotionally resonant. While the relentless stress and complexity won't appeal to everyone, those who embrace its philosophical depth will find one of the most thought-provoking games in years. It's 11 Bit Studios firing on all cylinders, creating a rare game that makes you question your own life choices while desperately trying to survive.
The Alters delivers a phenomenal space survival game with an impressive UI. This helps newbie gamers to gather their thoughts and master the core mechanics. Alongside this, every previous dialogue choice is highlighted. This will impress completionists and those looking for increased longevity, replay value and a straightforward path to each branching storyline. This is a love it or hate it genre. The survival elements can be stressful. Additionally, managing your weird cloned twins is pretty odd. However, combine these mechanics with interesting exploration and base building, and you have yourself a winner. The Alters is unusual but fun. It offers an original take on the genre, and I recommend getting it from the Xbox store.
The Alters lets you recruit alternate versions of yourself to survive on a desolate planet. It’s a unique concept that ties in with the story and makes you curious about what comes next. Figuring out what to do next can be difficult and having to progress to unlock upgrades feels inconvenient. This game has an interesting concept that knocks the premise out of the park.
The Alters is an extremely ambitious game, rich in compelling ideas and executed brilliantly where it truly matters — particularly in its branching narrative, its encouragement to explore the different personalities of the protagonist, and its promise of a unique journey from player to player, or even upon revisiting. Despite some harder-to-endure barriers, largely due to its attempt to merge too many mechanics, The Alters stands out precisely because of this fusion. The result is a tone that feels intense, claustrophobic, and even philosophical, evoking emotions not unlike those of a horror game — where you never know what’s around the next corner — or a survival experience where you’re surrounded by threats and left with “a single bullet”. There are no monsters here, no locked doors — just a ticking clock and the success of an entire mission in your hands.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
The Alters is exactly what I needed to experience in a narrative sci-fi game. The idea of being able to have multiple versions of yourself (who remembers the movie Multiplicity with Michael Keaton?), having to manage them in an apocalyptic context while understanding the state of emergency is excellent. The sheer number of possible scenarios, when a normal game should take between 25 and 30 hours, adds a huge amount of replayability. We feel that the choices we make, whether at the very beginning of our adventure or not, have an impact on the story. And having the power to decide whether to sow chaos or not, with the results that follow, is brilliant.
Review in French | Read full review
It's not just about surviving a dying planet—it’s about surviving yourself. The Alters is a triumph of concept, design, and emotion. It may stumble in its systems, but it soars in its soul.
The Alters isn’t for everyone. If you prefer fast-paced action or streamlined resource management, this might feel slow or cumbersome. But if you’re the kind of player who appreciates narrative weight, moral ambiguity, and gameplay that reflects character, this one hits hard. A survival game rarely feels this human. Every decision echoes. Every Alter adds a new layer to the question: “Who are you, really?”
The Alters is a bold experiment that mostly succeeds. It dares to explore questions of identity, regret, and collaboration in a setting that could have easily defaulted to standard survival tropes. Instead, it delivers a deeply personal game about being many people and learning how to live with them. Smart mechanics, emotional stakes, and a strong narrative spine make this one of the more memorable indie titles in recent years.
The Alters may not reinvent base building or survival gameplay, but it masterfully frames both around a fascinating narrative hook. This is a game that asks the player, “What if you could meet who you could’ve been?” and makes that question its core mechanic.
The Alters is an amazing game, and one of the few that I could actually see myself replaying for the story. The combination of survival, gathering, and base building, mixed with a winding, sci-fi story where your choices matter, is a treat and so intriguing that it only gets better the longer you play. Even with some little nuisances later and a slight overwhelming feeling, nothing ever detracted from the gameplay or story, and I was loving it. I was also surprised that it plays as well as it does on the Steam Deck. It isn't perfect, and does have some hitches and slowdowns, but it sticks above 30 FPS for the most part and looks great. It does need a lot of power, but in the end, it will be worthwhile to play on the go.
The Alters delivers a powerful narrative experience, though its gameplay can feel frustrating at times. 11 bit studios reaffirms its talent for exploring the human condition through games.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Technical issues aside, we’ve had a great time playing The Alters. It poses tough choices and requirements to the player, and gives us a tight time limit and a thousand other things to keep track of, all while teasing us with new exposition or areas to explore that we’ll never get to in one sitting. It’s a tough game, but give it the time it deserves and you find yourself deeply invested in Jan(s) home.
The idea of mixing strategic management with existential drama and science fiction results in a game that will demand both the player's technical and social skills. This is where my perception of it being a weird subversion of a farm simulator, such as Story of Seasons, comes into play. It's just that instead of planting turnips, milking cows and trying to woo some of the village's bachelorettes (or bachelors), we have to mine an inhospitable planet, maintain a functional mobile base and prevent alternative versions of ourselves from killing each other. In short, The Alters can be as welcoming as it is irritating — but it is also unique in its own way.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
So far, The Alters is the most compelling and intriguing game I’ve played this year.
The Alters and its innovative gameplay invite you to confront your own decisions as you fight for survival. A masterpiece not to be missed.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The Alters teaches us that along the non-stop race for survival, sometimes you need to relax with a movie night with the people who know you best.
Full disclosure: I am not the target demographic for a survival and base building centric game. However, The Alters primary focus is the sci-fi narrative that is crafted around a bold and unique concept. The survival and base building elements aren’t here for you to create your own narrative, but instead they drastically heighten the stakes of the existing one. The Alters exceeds expectations in every facet of the game. The narrative had depth beyond an intriguing premise as it provoked philosophical thought. The base building featured a tetris like grid, which made it engaging, but easy to understand, and the survival elements didn’t feel meaningless, they felt crucial to my survival. Best of all, The fusion of all of these elements highlighted the best everything harmonized together
THE ALTERS is a compelling, if sometimes chaotic, sci-fi odyssey brimming with ambition and innovation. Its customizable systems, engaging narrative arcs, and unique take on identity through alter creation make it a standout experience. The onboarding could be smoother, and not all mechanics are user-friendly out of the gate, but those who persevere will find a richly layered game full of meaningful decisions and poignant solitude. For fans of thoughtful, atmospheric sci-fi survival, it’s absolutely worth exploring.