All Sketches Wish to be Real
Do you ever wonder what your life might be like if you had chosen to do things differently? What if you hadn’t parted ways with that special someone? Or what if you had? What if your choices took you someplace new? Or what if they didn’t? How much of you would still be you if at some point in your life you took that other road instead?
That question forms the emotional core of The Alters, 11 Bit Studios’ latest game to hit PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S this weekend.
This survival and base-building adventure from the people behind the fiendishly complex survival sims This War of Mine and the Frostpunk series centers on Jan Dolski (Alex Jordan), the sole survivor of a doomed space expedition, who, along with his unconventional crew, find themselves in a race against time to escape a hostile planet.
Jan’s crew is unconventional in the sense that everyone in it is an alternate version of Jan, a clone of sorts — or Alter — specifically plucked from a pivotal moment in Jan’s personal history, and brought to life by alien technology.
If Jan hadn’t left home early to escape his violent father, leaving behind his loving mother and creating a deep and permanent sense of guilt, he might have learned to stand up to the brute, becoming the gruff, hands on, and no-nonsense Technician the crew badly needs right now. But if the crew intends to make it out alive they’re going to also need Scientist Jan, Doctor Jan, Refiner Jan, Botanist Jan, and several more pairs of hands to fulfil their almost insurmountable list of survival tasks.
In the beginning, the game guides you as to which Alter is most needed in the current crisis. However as the game progresses, you can look at Jan’s life memories, consider each potential pivot, and decide for yourself which would be best suited to a particular task at hand. Just don’t expect your different selves to leap into existence ecstatically happy and willing to get to work. The Alters are fully formed characters in their own right. Some of them just want to return to their own lives, if such a thing is even possible, and not all of them even like you.
But wait. Let’s back up a minute.
The game kicks off from a third person, over the shoulder perspective. After crash landing on a planet orbiting three suns, you soon discover your crew is dead. Formerly you were a lowly “Project Dolly” grunt in a team of experienced explorers, scientists, and researchers searching for a rare and highly prized mineral called Rapidium. Now you are alone in a hostile world, both the sole survivor, and head of an expedition you feel singularly unqualified for.
There’s very little time to take in the beautifully alien landscape around you with its looming hexagons of basalt rock rising from an angry black sea, as you are forced to make it to the research base — a giant wheel-like structure on the shore, equipped with a stationary Hub inside acting as the base. If you’re lucky you’ll make it inside just before a peculiar radiation event sweeps the planet’s surface. You don’t want to be out and about after 8 p.m. as this is a regular nightly occurrence. So too are mysterious multi-dimensional bubbles or ‘interals’ blobbing about on the landscape, and almost invisible to the naked eye, that threaten to envelop you in later stages of the game.
Once inside, your attempts to contact Earth are made difficult by the radiation storm. When you finally get through, it seems your supervisors are less curious about the fate of your crew and more interested to learn if you’ve found any Rapidium yet. Added to this is a series of Earth factions who covertly want you to achieve different ends, some of which appear to clash directly with your very survival.
We get the feeling that life in space is cheap.
A quick stock take of your new environment and you soon learn things aren’t going well here either. The planet is in lethal proximity to a triple star system. Mere days from now a new sunrise will burn you and your research base to a crisp, unless you can find a way to move the base to a new location on another shaded part of the planet, while you wait for rescue, or find a way to make it off planet yourself. But to do so, you will need to replenish the base’s stocks of minerals and organics, build special machinery, new modules, protect the base from ongoing radiation assaults, and find the time to eat and sleep.
An impossible job for a crew of one.
However your discovery of Rapidium, known as the time-travelling or “Savior” element due to its rapid growth-inducing properties, on the planet’s surface proves a game changer. Onboard is a Quantum computer which you are startled to discover has a brain scan of your entire life, as a series of stored memories (Hey? Did you consent to that?). A mysterious contact from Earth advises you that you can combine the Quantum computer, with a DNA sample, and a dash of Rapidium to create a fast-growing clone with a specific set of memories to help you achieve your ends. Not only that but the Quantum computer can show you your life’s alternate and infinitely branching timelines based on the decisions you made (or didn’t make). By honing in on a particular version of yourself from another timeline, you can create an Alter with a set of specific talents you have not managed to accrue in your own personal lifetime.
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Deeply unethical? Dangerous and amoral? Yes. Yes. And yes. But with no other means to save yourself from imminent fiery death you crank up the machine’s artificial ‘Womb’ and build yourself yourself.
Hello, Technician Jan! You look like you could build some special tools to help make the job of mining go a little faster.
Actor Alex Jordan does a phenomenal job at giving each Alter you create a unique voice, an individual perspective, and even their own distinct body language. Each new Jan not only looks unique, but harbors a different set of hopes, dreams, doubts, and insecurities. As the original Jan, how you interact with each of them — whether by confronting, advising, placating, or just plain talking things through — shapes their overall sense of mental wellbeing. You may even be surprised to discover your Alters have some surprising revelations of their own to divulge to you along the way. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an 11 Bit Studios game without an ethically agonizing resource management system. The crew is constantly under the clock, with the planet’s imminent sunrise threatening to burn you all to a crisp from the very outset. More Jans mean more essential tasks can be accomplished quickly, such as growing food, replenishing the base’s stock of radiation filters and repair kits, constructing and repairing machinery, mining essential metals, minerals, and organics from the planet’s surface, researching new technologies, and more. However, more Jans means more mouths to feed, basic comforts and morale to be considered, and ultimately more life and death decisions to be made in the heat of a number of key moments.
The game allows you to return to the outside environment during certain hours to explore, mine for minerals and metals, and discover rich veins of organic materials. The opportunity to do so offers a nice respite from the (albeit quite satisfying) micro-management of your inside environment. Mining outposts can be set up outside in key discoverable locations to automatically harvest resources via a series of interconnected pylons that you can set down. (Thankfully you don’t have to construct these on your base at first. However as your base, and its crew of Jans grows, your needs will too, meaning you’ll have to learn how to craft pylons, radiation filters, batteries, space suit upgrades, mining probes and a whole lot more if you’re going to survive this mess.)
The planet can also be scavenged for other items including scattered mementoes from Jan’s past among the crash debris. (Try giving these special items to particular Alters to change their moods and perspectives or just to brighten their day.) While there is no combat as such, you will initially need to research a grappling hook and drill to get access to certain areas, as well as a luminator, a sort of flash-light weapon to deal with the aforementioned wobbly bubbles of multi-dimensional material later on.
Back in the base, we are treated to a diorama style layout of rooms reminiscent of Fallout Shelter, with a series of additional modules that can be set down, moved, and even deleted according to your needs. Initially you start with the Captain’s cabin, command center, a machinery, the quantum computer, and some storage rooms, but soon you’ll soon need a dorm for your alters to sleep in (or individual rooms if you’re flush with resources), somewhere to grow food, and some common and recreation rooms for your crew if you want to take care of them and keep their spirits high. (You can even engage in a game of Beer Pong or two, or watch a movie together if you have the time.)
Space is tight, so you may need to plan carefully, or even remove a room or two as you go. Thankfully deleted rooms return if not all then a modest chunk of the mineral resources you spent in order to create them, meaning you are not overly penalized for changing the layout. As you progress through the game you have the option to enlarge the base to add more modules.
Entering a module or room zooms in on it allowing us to direct Jan to move about, interact with objects, and talk to his Alters. Each space is delightfully kitted out and filled with little details that render a deep sense of realism to proceedings.
As you progress with your mission your Alters can be assigned specific tasks according to their designation, and will even suggest new jobs after finishing up. There are some handy game features that eliminate micro-management as the base becomes busier. For example you can choose to proceed with their suggestion (or nix the idea) with the press of a button, which is a nice time-saving feature. You can also create build-queues of tasks and assign them to your Alters without having to locate and visit each Alter individually throughout the base. Lastly, you can set limits for the production of certain essential items. e.g. foodstuffs, repair kits, radiation filters and so on, so that your crew doesn’t starve or fry without your oversight.
The Alters is a taut, challenging, and tension filled game that never lets you forget that you are racing against time. Individual game elements — base building, resource management, care and management of your Alters, survival, and exploration — are all expertly presented, and feel like full, well-rounded aspects of a cohesive whole. The sci-fi storyline is compelling and never less than engaging, and the characters feel like complete individuals you will come to genuinely care about over time — largely in part to the voice talents of Alex Jordan, and the game’s moving at at times deeply emotional script.
When all of these elements come together (especially in the latter stages of the game) things can begin to feel overwhelming, both from an emotional, and strategic standpoint. Resource management can feel fiddly, some tasks can feel repetitive, and the wants and desires of your Alters can often clash with your own, leading to tough decisions. Mismanage their needs and you might have a rebellion on your hands. Love them all a little too much and face the heartbreak of losing one or more along the way.
But this is all quite deliberate. Anyone who has poured hours into This War of Mine or either of the Frostpunk games will feel that familiar pull of panic, despair, and moral discomfort. What decisions are you willing to make? How far are you willing to go? What sacrifices are you comfortable to make? How will your choices shape you? Is this who you wanted to be?
In The Alters, there often isn’t a best choice, but only the least bad choice your moral compass will allow you to make.
This review would be remiss without a mention of the poetry and psychology behind The Alters — twin facets that elevate the game beyond a fun gaming experience and into a thoughtful work of art (see also Alan Wake 2). The game features an opening quote from The Blue House, a poem by Swedish poet and psychologist Tomas Tranströmer, who wrote with a sense of dreamlike intimacy and reverence for the ineffable about such things as the rhythm of the seasons and the beauty of nature. It’s no coincidence that the developers want players to consider The Blue House. Both the poem and the game are stories about a house. And those who inhabit it over its tumultuous seasons. And perhaps they’re both a little bit about destiny, and time, and the will to create, and our other selves, half-glimpsed, and only half-known. Not quoted in the game but equally poignant to its theme are the following lines from The Blue House:
It is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices.
I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives.
All sketches wish to be real.
Through the player’s own irrevocable choices, the game invites us to wonder what it might be like to meet our other sketches, even if for a brief moment in time. Like Jan, surrounded by his many Alters, each of whom represents a different decision, or a path taken, or not taken, (our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route) The Alters asks you to consider the question: who do you want to be?
Our Score: 10/10 — A cohesive blend of exploration, survival, and base-building wrapped in a thoughtful exploration of the human condition. The Alters is a complex, deeply original (emotional and stressful in turns) slice of sci-fi gaming deserving of its accolades. A heartfelt and exciting journey awaits.
Genre: Survival, Sci-Fi
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series X/S
Release Date: 06/13/25
Studio: 11 Bit Studios
Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
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