The Alters review: Every Jan has his story

The Alters is a game built entirely around the question of “what if.” What if you stayed in school and focused on science? What if you put your career aside to your wife’s dreams instead? It asks you to consider how a single decision can change the course of your life—and who you become because of it. For protagonist Jan Dolski, these aren’t just hypothetical questions. Thanks to a mysterious new compound, Jan is able to clone himself, with each version having lived out a different life based on diverging choices.

Blending resource management with survival elements, The Alters is a thought-provoking sci-fi tale that explores the fragility of identity and the weight of personal decisions. The choices you make affect how the story unfolds and how your counterparts perceive you, but they also open doors to deeper moral questions and introspection. While not without its flaws, the game delivers high-stakes moments and transforms isolation in space into a deeply personal, reflective experience.

Me, Myself, and I

Jan Dolski is the sole surviving crew member after a mission to explore a distant planet goes wrong. Project Dolly’s goal was to extract Rapidium, a rare compound that humanity has only dreamed of obtaining. When Jan finally reestablishes with the corporation funding the mission, he’s instructed to test Rapidium on sheep DNA—only to discover that it perfectly creates a clone which he names Molly—get the references? Alone and overwhelmed, Jan realizes cloning himself may be the only way to keep the station running and finish the mission.

These clones—called "Alters"—present as both a necessity and a complication. The first Alter, and every one created after, is generated through the space station’s Quantum Computer, which pinpoints a pivotal moment in Jan’s life and simulates an alternate version of him who took a different path. Each Alter comes equipped with their own memories, personalities, and unique life experiences, making them entirely distinct individuals.

Instead of offering preset character classes, The Alters gives you different versions of Jan. Jan the Technician is great at fixing equipment, while Jan the Scientist can unlock advanced tech and drive narrative progress. Need someone to tend to your greenhouse and harvest perfect crops? Jan the Botanist is your guy.

But their skills are only half the story. The real intrigue lies in creating versions of yourself who lived entirely different lives. Jan himself remains largely unshaken by this, but the Alters struggle to accept their new reality. Believing they’ve simply awoken from cryosleep, they think they’re still part of the original mission—when in fact, you just created them. It raises unsettling questions: Are they truly alive? Or are they just tools, replicas serving the “real” Jan?

Each Alter also reacts differently depending on your choices, and their opinions of you can shift drastically. Managing survival is one thing—managing your relationships with literal versions of yourself is another. If morale dips, so does productivity. But, hey, why not get the gang together and watch some cheesy movies or play a game of beer pong or two? Yes, that game does serve a purpose here.

One of the most impressive aspects of The Alters is how convincingly each clone feels like a fully realized person. Voice actor Alex Jordan deserves high praise for bringing each version of Jan to life with distinct vocal nuances. The Scientist sounds condescending—because he kind of is—while the Botanist is so endearing, you feel guilty when he's sad. You're technically playing as Jan, but you’re never just playing as you. I do question why the Doctor has a Southern accent while the Shrink, who branches from his life path, doesn’t.

Some choices carry heavy consequences. Jan the Miner, for example, is emotionally fragile. You can choose to help him with medication or force him to deal with his trauma alone. One path could see him spiral and make a desperate move that ends in tragedy, while the other could help him survive and become one of your strongest allies. These moments make it easy to connect with the Alters—and difficult to lose them.

Mining for Survival

Outside of emotional dilemmas, The Alters is also about the nitty-gritty of survival. You’ll need to keep the space station operational until rescue arrives. Each act presents a major goal, but you must also handle routine tasks to gather and manage resources. Every in-game day begins with a grim reminder about the sun's trajectory: if it approaches your space station, you die so you have to keep moving across the planet to avoid its rays. This adds an ever-present sense of dread, blending psychological tension with practical survival.

Each act resets your objectives, but the core gameplay loop remains. Scout the area, establish mining stations, and connect them back to your base via pylons. Once hooked up, these mining stations let you fast travel to them—which interestingly enough, doesn’t eat into your time—and lets you assign Alters to them to mine for resources. Certain items will require a mix of resources so you’ll need multiple mining stations set up to be able to craft everything you want, but you also will need to that you need to place Alters at each station in order to get anything. And, if you run out of storage space, then you can’t mine anything anymore.

Time management becomes essential as every action you take—especially building or mining—burns hours quickly. Push yourself too far and exhaustion sets in, limiting your effectiveness. The first few days at a new site, the game gives you a few days to get into your rhythm, but eventually you will be hit with a magnetic storm where everything hits the fan.

These storms can last hours or more than a day, during which systems will fail and your Alters must scramble to keep things running. If you run out of radiation filters, you all die. It's stressful, but if you've stockpiled well, it's manageable. The game also comes with various difficulty settings that let you make tweaks to the amount of resources you need for certain items allowing you to focus on the story or survival. It’s really up to you how to play it, but in its default setting, The Alters offers a nice blend of survival and storytelling that keeps you invested.

You can also expand your space station by creating new rooms for your Alters to hang out in. Like the infirmary or social lounge, these can provide practical purposes, and others help expand your storage space needed to create story-driven materials. It’s a fun way to customize your base to your liking and arrange them in ways that make sense for you, but it’s odd that you can build these in an instant as long as you have the necessary resources.

Space Wonders

Hazards aren’t limited to the station either. As you explore each new location, strange anomalies—shimmering, translucent blobs—can block your path. ing through them raises your radiation levels dangerously. Black out, and an Alter may rescue you, but you'll lose the rest of the day and you’ll both be radiated. There's no traditional combat, but later tools let you neutralize these threats and mine them for crucial resources.

Visually, the game is stunning. The planet’s various terrains evoke a genuine sense of otherworldliness, while the haunting sounds of anomalies and an eerie soundtrack evoke both isolation and hope. That said, I did experience occasional performance hiccups—brief stutters and moments when Jan would freeze or float—but they weren’t game-breaking.

Final Thoughts

After three acts, The Alters had taken me through a range of emotions. One of its more puzzling design choices is how it handles save files: the game auto-saves at the end of each day but deletes old saves unless you manually lock them. If you want to revisit a key decision, you’ll need to protect that file in advance—which feels at odds with a game built on branching outcomes.

The game also ended up being longer than I expected. While I enjoyed the daily loop of resource gathering and problem-solving, the length, combined with the restrictive save system, made it hard to go back and explore all the different Jan variants. I wish the game let you “branch” your saves the way Jan branches his life.

In the end, The Alters delivers a gripping, existential survival experience that explores identity, regret, and self-acceptance in a way few games attempt. It’s a game about surviving the harshness of space—but also about learning who you are through the people you could have been. It's a little longer than it needs to be, but its story, systems, and emotional weight make it hard to forget.