I never thought The Alters, the new sci-fi survival game from developers 11 Bit Studios and behind Frostpunk 2 and This War of Mine, would become my favourite game of 2025 so far. Mainly because I didn’t think that a base-building survival game could weave in themes of grief, and dive into such topics as the butterfly effect and how intergenerational trauma can impact our personalities. It’s not just this element that makes The Alters a stunning game, however; it’s the beauty of the graphics, the easy-to-grasp game mechanics, and the way it continued to surprise me that also played a huge part in why I fell in love with this world and premise.

In The Alters, you play as Jan Dolski, a builder who has signed up for a space journey that goes terribly wrong and finds himself to be the only survivor. His comms with Earth have been damaged, and he is all alone on a planet covered in radiation. The ”sun” is fast approaching, however, and this will destroy you and your surroundings if you don’t resituate your base. The planet contains a special material called Rapidium, which has the ability for Jan to clone himself; these clones aren’t just carbon copies of Jan, though – they are versions of Jan that could have been if he had made different decisions in his life.

The Alters facilitates this in a fun and satisfying way by introducing ”branching,” a process that shows Jan’s lifepath through the visceral imagery of a long red cell-like organism. Nodes on this organism show important moments in Jan’s life, such as being bullied by his father and falling in love for the first time. With Rapidium, these memories can be manipulated, and new nodes are formed that veer off from Jan’s original life path. These alternative paths lead to the cloned Jan to have a very different job from builder Jan, meaning that you can select the kind of Jan that you need to help you on your journey.

Because you will need a lot of help to make it out alive in The Alters, 11 Bit Studios has made it clear that you won’t be able to experience everything in your initial playthrough, highlighting the game’s replay value from the jump. The HUD will constantly be keeping you up to date with what you need to be doing to stay alive and will be constantly throwing obstacles in your way. It also works in a 24-hour cycle, so you also have to be careful how your different Jans spend their time. You can assign your Jans to complete different tasks, mainly mining and keeping modules up to date, such as keeping the kitchen stocked with food and upkeep on each module.

Most of your time will be spent searching for materials on the planet’s surface that will help you stay alive. It is during this exploration that the severity of your isolation is fully understood, as the planet you are on is devoid of any real life. The outside of your base provides a stark contrast to the base’s interior, which is always illuminated, colourful and clinical. However, keep exploring and you will see colours slowly leaking into the world, mainly coming from the materials that you need to collect. These sparkle in reds, purples and greens and add to the possible alien activity that is plaguing the planet.

All these modules and equipment are made from materials found on the planet, and the workshop will give you a breakdown of what elements you will need and how many to create the item. As I haven’t had too much experience with base builders, I chose the ‘beginner’ option from the game’s loading screen, and I’m glad that I did. The one thing I found difficult about modules was where to place them in the base’s grid. Everything had to be connected either via elevators or corridors, and the base building became a sort of Tetris block puzzle. Sometimes I found it frustrating, but once I got the right sequence of elevators to modules and the game gave me the ‘O.K.’ to proceed, I was very satisfied. After all, not building a module could literally end your playthrough, because alters may ask for things to be built, and if you comply, well, they may think that you don’t really care about them.

A big part of The Alters is making sure your clones are happy and aren’t going through too much emotional turmoil since being created. Though you choose your alter via the nodes that are found in the Quantum computer, the alters are ‘born’ in a separate module, the womb. When they awaken, it’s up to you to make sure that they aren’t too confused or triggered by their existence.

Dialogue choices play a big part here, and these choices can be the difference between your alter living or dying. For example, one of my alters had lost their arm in their lifetime and becomes extremely upset when they realise they now have their arm back. He asked me to support him through this pain, and I made a choice that ended up with him cutting off his arm anyway. In my next playthrough, I made a completely different choice, but it still ended with my alter injured and then, unfortunately, dying. I respect the devs decisions with this character as it shows how sometimes, no matter what you do, something or someone just can’t be saved. Because The Alters is all about the choices we make, and don’t make, in order to survive and keep multiple versions of ourselves alive.