The Alters has been haunting my gaming radar since its first cryptic teaser dropped-management, existential sci-fi, clones of yourself, all wrapped in that signature 11 bit studios melancholy. But after putting in close to 20 hours on PS5 Pro, mostly late at night and with my controller gripped tight, I’m caught between admiration and exhaustion. This is a game that’s simultaneously ambitious, affecting, and, at times, as thick and unwieldy as a neutron star. Here’s what it’s actually like to live (and sometimes lose your mind) in this no man’s land of fractured egos.
I’ve always been a sucker for games that blend existential dread with management headaches (hell, my Shenmue obsession is basically built on awkward men staring at clouds of regret). The Alters hooked me hard with its promise: you play Jan Dolski, crash-landed alone on a hostile, irradiated planet, with only your own alternative selves—“Alters”—to keep you company and get you out alive before the sunrise literally nukes your sorry hide. The kicker? Each Alter is born out of a pivotal regret or fork-in-the-road in Jan’s miserable life. Think if the Persona “shuffle time” ritual ran your logistics department.
Booting up the game, I was pleasantly surprised—the intro doesn’t drag out the set-up. You’re battered, you’re alone, you stagger into this battered, modular mobile base, and you’re instantly bombarded with problems: hull breaches, radiation warnings, AI reminders pinging away, and orders from a faceless corporate boss who cares more about the rare Rapidium ore than your personal hell.
My first session barely lasted two in-game days before I screwed myself over. Unlike your typical survival-crafting loop, in The Alters, everything’s throttled by time, energy, and—most importantly—your limited capacity to multitask. The moment I crafted my first Alter (a version of Jan who stood up to his abusive dad in childhood), I thought I’d finally unlocked “easy mode.” Nope. Each Alter needs to be kept busy, happy, and not catastrophically irradiated, and every “personality” comes with its own needs and quirks. Left one alone on night shift? He moped, productivity tanked, and then he sabotaged a repair job out of spite. I kid you not—it’s like orchestrating a workplace full of your worst, drama-prone buddies.
I got cocky by day three, trying to juggle mining, base upgrading, and tech research while micromanaging my little alternate-verse family. Bad move: I let one Alter skip lunch, he spiraled, set off an argument chain, and infected the morale of half my crew. Meanwhile, a magnetic storm knocked out the comms module I’d neglected to prioritize. By the time I scrambled to fix it, I was too irradiated to function. Game over, reload save from two hours ago.
That’s the thing: The Alters is never just one system. At any moment you’re tracking personal fatigue (you wake up at 7am, hit exhaustion at 8pm, after which the world can literally kill you), food supplies, Rapidium upgrades, base layout (which is basically Space Tetris), and the shifting emotional landscape of your alters. The base itself is gloriously modular—you literally swap in rooms, build hydroponics, attach new research segments, and wire up pylons to distant mining outposts. It’s satisfying, until you realize you’ve left some critical component out and the dominoes fall in spectacular fashion.
Let me get one thing out of the way: The Alters absolutely nails that oppressive, “something’s always about to go south” atmosphere I crave in sci-fi. Panoramas outside your battered base are gorgeous—dust storms, strobing alien auroras. I stopped more than once to just rotate the camera, letting my brain stew in the dread. The first time I saw the sunrise inching down on the horizon, ticking away my real-time safety margin, it genuinely raised my anxiety. The menus are surprisingly clean too—nothing like the UI horror show I feared after the reveal trailers.
BUT—crucially—there’s a difference between complex and overdesigned. The game throws a deluge of resource types, upgrade paths, and mini-games at you early on. Some tasks are clear (cook food, manufacture filters), but others are so layered (optimizing research trees, balancing power grids, double-checking mood modifiers) that I was still discovering them after 10 hours. I actually lost one run because I missed a filter production chain buried three menu layers deep. And don’t get me started on the science side missions you juggle while balancing base expansion—one poorly planned day and you’re toast, like, literally vaporized by sunrise.
Also, the game is brutally honest when you mess up. Early on, I opted to forcibly implant a neural chip into one Alter despite his vocal objections. Hours later, he led a mutiny that left me scrambling, losing productivity, and ultimately a key upgrade. It’s grim, it’s grounded, and it means choices stick—for better or (often) worse.
Here’s where things get rough—sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. My time with The Alters was peppered with bugs: two full-on crashes to the dash, weird UI artifacts, two save corruptions (one requiring a reload 18 in-game days prior—unforgivable in 2024!). There’s no fully dubbed French, nor much use of the PS5’s DualSense, and on at least three occasions, AI pathing just broke, leaving an Alter stuck behind a wall until I reloaded. Some of this was patched toward the end, but the scars of early-release jank run deep. I genuinely think 11 bit studios should’ve held back for two more months—the core game is good enough to deserve a smoother launch.
On the plus side, the game runs smooth most of the time on PS5 Pro—load times never annoyed me, and the art design is consistently high tier. But music is barely there, and considering how lonely and haunted you can feel, I wanted some sonic atmosphere to stretch out the tension. Instead, my most tense moments were silent save for Jan’s muttering and a flickering warning claxon. I love minimalist soundtracks, but here, it feels like a missed opportunity.
If you cut your teeth loving the brutality of This War of Mine, or if awkward branching choices and sci-fi management twists are your jam, you’ll likely eat The Alters up. It isn’t RimWorld-level sandbox, but the meaty story and significant narrative branches mean it’ll keep pulling you back just to see “what if.” If micro-managing a dysfunctional clone army makes your eye twitch or you don’t like juggling dozens of interlocking tabs, though—this isn’t a casual sit-down. And the technical bugs (at least at launch) demand patience.
After nearly 20 hours, flubbing endings, saving-and-reloading like a maniac, my feelings about The Alters remain tangled. There’s genius here—a game that forces you to confront your own alternate failures, that surprises you with the real, lasting consequences of management gone awry. The moment when I realized my favorite alter couldn’t help me because of a choice I’d made hours before? Genuinely gutting. The sense of scale as the sun creeps closer, knowing the “real” solution was buried in a missed tech tree? Absurdly satisfying when you stick the landing.
But holy hell, it’s also a beast to parse, and the launch roughness means too many players will bounce off before seeing the best bits. I’d say: wait for another patch or two if you can, or dive in now if you crave high-stakes narrative management and have the patience of a saint.
If The Alters were a fighting game, it’d be the sort where you pull off a beautiful string, only to trip over your own setup and lose the round—but somehow, you’d still queue up for one more match. There’s a hell of an experience here under the clutter and chaos, for those willing to sink in, risk failure, and maybe reflect on the crummier versions of yourself along the way.
Get access to exclusive strategies, hidden tips, and pro-level insights that we don't share publicly.
Ultimate Reviews Strategy Guide + Weekly Pro Tips