We’re only halfway through the year, and I can tell The Alters is going to end up on my top 10 list for 2025.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 3 years since it was announced, but this is a game I’ve been interested in since the reveal trailer, and the finished product delivers for me. It’s a survival game in the vein of This War Of Mine (also from these developers), with a bunch of additional emotional baggage to tangle with as a result of the core premise.

The lone survivor of a crash on a hostile planet, your only hope for survival is to use your resources to create clones of yourself to share the workload. But not direct clones; instead you go in and artificially tinker with their memories, making different choices that would have led you down a different path, to a different career.

So when the clone pops out, believing they’ve lived this alternate life, their skills and personalities differ from your own, even if they look just like you. It opens up all sorts of nature vs nurture question on top of the morality of it all, and has you tangling with these problems at the same time you need to handle some science to keep your base keeping you alive.

Choosing which alters to generate is interesting (you can only have a few), akin to picking “classes” for certain bonuses and aptitudes, but also balancing their personality quirks with their statistical benefits.

I love it when a game shows me something I haven’t really seen before, and The Alters does that wonderfully.