‘The Alters’ is a genre-blending sci-fi survival ordeal about the horrors of being a project manager

We wouldn’t bat an eye if you compared Jan Dolski, the protagonist of The Alters, to Robert Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes after playing two hours of 11 bit studios’ latest. It’s the sort of space video game that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. Coupled with a surprisingly restrained scope and hard-hitting writing, this might be the sleeper hit in the sci-fi gaming space we were waiting for this year.

At first glance, The Alters is doing a lot. It’s equal parts a management sim with base-building elements that owes much of its DNA to The Sims, a narrative adventure ala Deliver Us Mars, and a stress-inducing juggling of resources akin to the studio’s beloved Frostpunk titles. That’s a lot of spinning plates, and it could have been too much for a single game to handle properly.

Fortunately, after spending seven hours with the game, I’m only seeing signs of the opposite: The Alters could be one of 2025’s most focused and tightly designed space games.

All by myself

Like most excellent space adventures, The Alters starts with a bang: Jan Dolski, a difficult man looking to escape his troubled past, embarks on a high-stakes expedition to a distant planet with the mission of obtaining the elusive Rapidium, a new element that has time-accelerating properties.

Things get off to an awful start when the rest of the crew dies upon landing, and Jan learns he’s all alone and at risk of being burned to a crisp by the sun. The good news is that dawn is days away. The bad news is that you have to find a way to outrun the sun, complete the mission, and rendezvous with a rescue party.

Jasn can’t accomplish this alone, though; he’ll need help from himself… or rather, his Alters. Based on the biggest decisions he’s made in the past, a quantum computer aboard the ship and the cutting-edge printer powered by Rapidium can quickly up the expedition’s chances of success (and survival) by putting out several, very distinct alternative versions of Jan.

What starts off like a more ambitious riff on Duncan Jones’ Moon soon becomes a stressful trip through the planet’s unstable surface and Jan’s psyche, manifested physically in the shape of other Jans that either hate or him… depending on choices related to the issues at hand (mostly not dying in a variety of ways) and what they did or didn’t do at past forks in the road.

The resulting adventure is both conceptually sprawling and shockingly intimate once it gets going. There are no combat encounters to overcome, no cinematic sequences to rival Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters… It’s a video game that knows the medium’s unique strengths lie in interactivity and the player’s ability to make decisions.

Despite the lack of bombast, The Alters tells a compelling and heartfelt narrative, with some goofier moments to break up the unrelenting drama. It’s not a flawless presentation — some dialogue falls flat in key scenes — but overall it’s an enthralling tale from start to end.

The rhythm of routine

In practice, The Alters is all about the highs and lows of a routine, albeit a bizarre routine where you’re trapped with the path-not-taken versions of yourself. Who’s doing the cooking? Who’s spending all day mining? How can we get our radiation barriers up before more magnetic storms toast the massive wheel-shaped ship’s systems? Each day brings new questions, challenges, and possibilities, and 11 bit studios’ biggest success is finding a satisfying cadence in this ever-shifting mountain of grueling work and begrudging coexistence.

The occasional drama aside, the Alters are surprisingly good at following the original Jan’s orders. You can assign activities to them, and they’ll ask for more work on their own once the queued-up tasks are done. You can also manage most of the resource production, maintenance, and repairs from afar, which substantially lowers the level of tedium, leaving you to deal with more pressing matters outside the ship. You know, stuff like looking into a parallel universe or trying to figure out how to build a bridge over that massive river of lava.

Much like real life itself, Jan’s life is a balancing act, which makes his working-class-hero odyssey more relatable. It’s also what makes The Alters difficult to recommend to anyone looking for a way to disconnect from a stressful job. You’ve played parts of The Alters before, but you’ve never seen them mixed like this. It’s sci-fi survival without the aimless grind. It’s an adventure without the relentless action. It’s a real-time strategy without the top-down view and hundreds of units to command.

Who said you can’t build something special out of used parts?

The Alters is now available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. It’s a day-one launch on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass as well. A PC code was provided by the publisher.