A lot of people are into survival games, whether it's in first-person, third-person, or side-scrolling. The genre is heavily crowded with so many games like SCUM, Project Zomboid, Frostpunk, and more. With the release of The Alters from 11 bit studios on June 13, 2025, it seems to stand out in the survival game market.
The Alters is a sci-fi survival game that mixes base building with exploration, and players will face an emotional narrative that follows Jan Dolski, the sole survivor of his space expedition. The base structure and how it looks remind me of games such as Fallout Shelter, but what else makes the game stand out?
I think the narrative is one of the things that makes The Alters shine. In many survival games like SCUM, there's a premise but your character's story isn't entirely relevant. There are games such as Frostpunk where there's storytelling, but you'll mostly have people join you through your expeditions, or just ones that luckily stumble upon your base.
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+ 2However, in The Alters, it's heavily driven by the story, as you have a goal and a mystery to solve. You're doing all of these while trying to survive each day on your own. You start the story by finding out that every person who's supposed to be with you is dead by some mysterious means.
But with every person on your crew dead, you'll soon find out that you can create Alters of Jan with varying personalities and skill sets. From there, you'll do whatever you can to survive and find out more about what's happening.
As with other 11 bit studios games like This War of Mine, you'll be making a lot of decisions, which can be stressful. I think it's what I like about most of their survival games, the harsh reality of the situations we're put in, which most likely have their deadly or catastrophic consequences.
click to enlarge + 2Other than those things, I actually like the fact that we're the ones who go out to the field to see what the environment looks like. I've just been so used to being stuck on the base interface, not knowing what the expeditions are facing in other games that resemble The Alters in terms of gameplay.
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