The Alters wins my vote as indie game of the year
Developed by the ever-creative 11 Bit Studios, creators of Frostpunk, other amazing games, and publishers of even more, comes the “must-play” hit, The Alters. A masterpiece in decision-based gameplay that is fully realized in the outcomes based on said choices.
The Alters has surpassed my expectations of what indie games can achieve. In the past few years, it seems almost every smash indie game, except for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has been something more like the drug-dealing simulations of Schedule I.
Those types of games are tons of fun, and I’m having a blast playing them with my friends. Still, they’re not something with a narrative-driven story that forces you to question the decisions in your life.
That last sentence might sound heavy-loaded, but it’s not meant to be — it’s the truth. The Alters, on multiple occasions, managed to hit way too close to home for me. Let me explain.
First, what exactly is The Alters?
You’re Jan Dolski, a man who finds himself stranded and alone on a remote alien planet. The premise may sound familiar, but the triumphs and difficulties you’ll face are all but that.
Every playthrough will be unique based on the choice of quantumly calculated alternative versions of Jan that he creates called Alters. These Alters he generates will drive the story and determine his survival as he races against the clock.
You see, Jan’s life depends on being rescued before the sun overtakes his position, cooking him to a crisp. To make it out, he’ll leverage the manpower of the Alters in various ways to survive.
Every Alter has their own unique qualities based on the alternative choices Jan could have made during his life. Had he stood up to his father, fought harder for his marriage, or focused on his career, these possibilities are represented in the personalities of his Alters.
Jan’s escape depends on timeliness, but also on the delivery of a substance he discovered named Rapidium. This resource is the very reason he can create the Alters, and potentially the only reason he’s being rescued.
You’ll need to balance the control of your Alters, the gathering of Rapidium, and the relationships of everyone if you plan to make it back home.
The uncomfortable mirror selfie
So, why does The Alters resonate so profoundly with me?
I wrote about it in my preview, but my father has been renting a number of rooms inside hospitals as of late. Many midnight hours and restless nights have been spent walking through more than one set of emergency room doors.
A similar reflection of myself is seen in Jan Dolski’s past, an influential moment where many Alters shared the fate of their mothers passing away.
At the time of writing that piece, I had, hours before, bared a moment so many have seen yet fought against. My dad, when he thought his time had come, held my hand at our home, begging my mother and me to be alright after he was gone.
His one concern in the face of death was that the two most important people in his life would carry on in safety and health. Thankfully, my dad can ignore the very idea of dying, and as I finished my playthrough of The Alters, I was gifted the news that his health had taken a remarkably better turn.
In moments of panic, one idea had come to mind that I pitched as a potential cause of his sickness. Days later, we discovered that the thought I had proposed was the culprit.
While I’m no doctor, and the cause would have been found without my pitch, the very idea of a moment where speaking up can so differently alter the outcomes of our lives resonated with me. There are so many Alters, including the Jan Doctor, who took on a life of medicine, that drastically changed the outcomes of their lives due to their choices.
Our lives are full of these pivotal, decisive moments—points where we stand for what’s right or take actions that we feel are right. Not every juncture, whether right or wrong, gives us the outcome we deserve.
Many of the choices Jan made in his life are similar to pivotal moments anyone could experience. Again, this is marked by my own experiences, but first, the game itself.
Gameplay layered in emotional complexity
The decision-based gameplay in The Alters is absolutely phenomenal. I’d even say it rivals the legendary mechanics of Mass Effect (not Mass Effect 3, never Mass Effect 3).
I can’t even begin to describe all the different decisions you can make and the outcomes they generate as a result of being made. It’s a staggering amount that I don’t think I could count even after multiple playthroughs.
I’ll do my best to provide an example without giving too much away.
The Miner in the game is an Alter you can obtain early on, who specializes, you guessed it, in mining. In his life that never existed, he had lost his arm. When brought back, since the body is based on the real Jan Dolski, he had a new arm.
Over a short period of time, he’ll come to Jan asking if he can take pain medication for the pain he’s experiencing. It seems, for whatever reason, the Miner is going through some sort of reverse phantom pain.
You can either give him the medication or choose not to. While on his meds, he becomes accident-prone. Leading to one injury after another.
Your decisions from here can take you down at least six different routes. All of these tracks lead to some polarizing mixture of happiness or death.
For a $35 indie game, I’ve never seen this sort of depth in decision-based gaming. From terrific to awful outcomes, it’s not a simple choice of yes or no, but a fluid set of determinations I can make that have impactful consequences.
I hardly ever replay single-player games. Even my favorites, like Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted 4, and Dead Space, I’ve never touched again after completing their campaigns.
The Alters is one of the scarce exceptions to that rule thanks to the various outcomes a player can experience. It has somehow altered my own gaming preferences.
Our lives are full of these pivotal, decisive moments—points where we stand for what’s right or take actions that we feel are right. Not every juncture, whether right or wrong, gives us the outcome we deserve.
Moments are quick, sometimes instantaneous, and they happen at times you’d never otherwise suspect. That instant came when I was selling an electronic device in front of my home; I found myself at the barrel end of a gun.
With my phone snatched from my hand and the other items in his car, he walked over to his driver’s seat, gun still in hand. He crawled in, and it was at that moment that I noticed the passenger window had been left open. You see, my wife and I both know that I make some of the most brain-dead decisions from time to time, and this time, it wasn’t any different.
A choice was made when I jumped through his window and into the car. Grabbing both him and the weapon, he sped off, crashing into another home.
As I was sitting, shaking in my front yard with police outside, I held my soon-to-be wife, who was the one who called the police and witnessed the whole ordeal. So many different choices had led to that moment, to the reason he showed up and the reason he was arrested.
While there’s nothing quite like a robbery listed in Jan’s experiences, this is one of those life-altering moments that is reiterated throughout Jan’s timeline. What if I hadn’t jumped in or sold the item at all? What if he had actually shot?
Altering your gameplay
Sure, so the story and decision-based actions are great. We get it, what about the gameplay?
Not only is The Alters a game that tests the paths you never took, but it’s also a title that surrounds itself with sound gameplay.
I mentioned the Miner as someone who can better mine metals; that’s just one. The Botanist can grow food with 100% better efficiency; the Refiner can more efficiently distill resources; the Doctor can more effectively heal your alerts in the Infirmary than you can; the Shrink can better balance the emotions of your entire crew, etc.
While you can do just about everything yourself, as I’ve shown you, the Alters you create will be better at it in many instances. Even tasks they’re not better at can still be given to them. You can assign tasks to every Alter, from mining minerals to cooking in the kitchen.
While micromanaging can be the most efficient method, The Alters also takes this task out of your hands by allowing Alters to make autonomous decisions based on the needs of the base.
You might find yourself out of radiation filters, one of the items you’ll be in constant need of throughout the game. If you have them correctly set, and your Alters have nothing else to work on, they’ll ask you for permission to move over and begin work creating those filters.
Every Alter you pick will drastically affect not only the story of the game but also the strengths and efficiencies of your base.
You won’t be able to unlock every Alter in your playthrough. So, picking one over another will mean having better coverage in certain areas while suffering in others.
You can entirely skip ever creating The Doctor, but that means missing out on medical knowledge that cannot only affect the health of you and other Alters, but entirely change the outcome of specific storylines.
Further refining the ability to replay is the research tree. The Scientist, an Alter every playthrough will require, is the only one who can research upgrades to your equipment and base.
These include base expansion, story-based item creation, equipment efficiency upgrades, and even beer pong tables. Many of which will require the use of a specific resource that comes in limited quantity, unless some cheating or duplication glitch occurs.
Even the decisions you make during conversations and those related to your base will have a massive effect on the moods your Alters will experience. Navigating their personalities to find the perfect response during dialogue can make an Alter happy or rebellious.
Managing these mood swings is as essential as resource gathering. Speaking of!
Survival gameplay without the kinks
I’m a sucker for survival mechanics and based building. While The Alters obviously isn’t something like Rust or Dune: Awakening, you’ll be tasked with building and managing base efficiency that will make drastic differences during your playthrough.
Failure to manage the allocation of resources can lead to anger within the base, mutiny, game or screens, Alter deaths, and even different endings.
Your base can only hold so much at any given time. Toward the middle of the game, you’ll find yourself removing some critical spaces to make room for something else.
It’s a constant balance of having to balance the needs of the mission and survival with the desires of your Alters. Failure on either end can lead to death.
To gather resources, you’ll go out to build mining outposts on minerals, metals, organic materials, and more. Either you or one of your Alters can mine for these materials through the use of these outposts.
The best part? You won’t have to recreate the mining posts yourself. When leaving an area, your outposts, power pylons, and other devices you’ve set out will all come back to your base inventory, ready to be deployed in the next area.
Sure, you’ll have to place them yourself. But you don’t have to go out and unbuild everything like other survival games, where the task of building your base somewhere else requires intensive resource hauling. The Alters does it for you in such a terrific way that it removes much of the tedium of survival gameplay.
My only gripe: The combat
The fighting, if you can call it that, is somewhat repetitive. The main enemy in this game, other than the sun and time itself, is anomalies.
These pesky little guys require an Illuminator to take down. The weapon is essentially a light gun that requires precise targeting of the cores within these anomalies to destroy them.
To start, these are transparent space distortions that float in standing areas. You can either walk around them or take them down for a resource called Alx.
While anomalies will eventually become more aggressive or employ other functional attacks, such as following you or invading your space, it’s essentially the same thing every time. Shoot your light gun into the core to kill it; that’s it.
I understand The Alters isn’t a combat-focused game, but in every title that has combat, repetition is a worry. For me, the action did end up getting a little stale over time, and I would have loved to see some other enemy variety taking the place of these anomalies by Act 2 rather than simple tweaks to their “attack” patterns.
Why The Alters is my indie game of the year
Even with stiff combat, The Alters is a must-play title, tailored to players who enjoy decision-based gaming. If you’re a sucker for watching your choices both succeed and fail or even someone who likes to save scum, The Alters is a perfect pickup for you.
With base-building and survival gameplay that removes almost every negative aspect of the genre, veterans and newcomers alike will find both challenge and ease of use when exploring the mechanics within.
The game is something that I find so artistically well-done that it beckons the stuck-up writer personality within me. Calling to me, pushing me to write about how significant its hidden stories bore on me.
From one Alter to another, the tapestry of choices I interwove amongst them revealed unrealized truths about myself, stirring questions regarding my own life’s decisions. From the ever-brittle dance of relationships to the stark reality of mortality, I was swept by waves of emotions that exposed both the boundless radiance of joy and the quiet shadows of regret.
The Alters launches on June 13, 2025. It will be available on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and PlayStation 5.