With This War of Mine and Frostpunk, developer 11 Bit Studios has garnered a reputation for making games that force you to make challenging decisions. The Alters is a continuation of this pattern, melding a straightforward survival game with management systems designed around making tough calls. But this time, it’s not other people who will face the consequences of your decisions. Instead, The Alters forces you to confront other versions of yourself as you grapple with staying alive and keeping a small population of your clones happy. It’s an intriguing premise that delivers on the studio’s signature style, even if some of its survival systems occasionally get in the way.

You play as Jan Dolski, who wakes up on the shores of a black beach on a planet very far from home. The surroundings are dark and oppressive, with the stark red plumes of smoke from flares and cracking lightning above illuminating your way toward your only refuge; a monolithic wheel with a base suspended inside it. You are alone, and getting back home is going to require gathering a lot of resources. You do this by discovering resource deposits in the area around you, erecting a network of pylons as you explore further and further away from safety, and using it to ferry resources back.

You need a steady supply of metals, minerals, and organics to build better tools, construct additions to your base, and produce food in order to survive. The planet might be foreign, but it has what you need to get home. The only thing that isn’t in abundance is time. As the days tick by, the sunrise creeps closer, spelling doom to anyone caught in its highly radioactive rays.

Fortunately, you’re also surrounded by an ethereal mineral known as Rapidium, which can be used to accelerate the growth of living cells. With it, and a convenient stash of your entire life’s memories in a computer, you’re able to create clones of yourself to give you a fighting chance to get back home. Mechanically, creating alters is critical for your survival. Every action you take in The Alters takes a certain amount of time to complete, which races by as you hold down a button to perform actions like mining, cooking, repairing, and more. But there are also a finite number of hours in a day, and when Jan becomes exhausted, these tasks take longer and longer to complete.

It’s impossible to do everything yourself, so your alters are created to help. You can schedule one alter to manage an organics mine during a shift, while another spends their day crafting tools and vital radiation filters at the workshop, leaving you time to further explore the planet’s surface to find better resource deposits, investigate strange alien activity, and discover solutions to navigate each obstacle preventing your mobile base from progressing forward.

The Alters presents the idea that small decisions can have pivotal impacts on the trajectory of your life, and allows you to experiment with this idea when creating clones of yourself. Each alter specializes in a different field, which makes them more effective at most jobs than the original Jan. A miner Jan harvests resources most effectively, while technician Jan can repair base modules faster than anyone else. Every one is voiced by the same actor as the original Jan, with each personality presenting with a pleasing level of seriousness and playfulness given the scenario. Voice acting does a lot of heavy lifting in story-critical moments that are conveyed through static scenes, and it’s compelling throughout.

Each of your alters can perform almost any job, but there are specific ones that only a specialist can be assigned to. Scientist Jan, for example, is the only one that can perform research into a vast array of equipment and base upgrades, which are vital for survival as your resource needs start outstripping your traditional means of production. Navigating your base over a river of lava or through a gravity distortion takes both specialized tools and lots of resources, so it’s critical to manage each day effectively to ensure you can progress before the next sunrise arrives to end your journey prematurely.

This would be straightforward enough, if the alters you manufacture weren’t also occasional sources of friction. Helpful as they might be, your alters will challenge you on the decisions you made that ultimately steered your life away from what their life is, while also questioning the decisions you’re making in order to keep everyone alive. All of them share an understanding that there’s no certainty around what happens to them once they help you fulfill your mission to get home, so convincing them to give their lives to pursue it takes some clever management of its own. Their personalities dictate whether they respond well to being comforted or pushed in equal measure, while their moods determine how long they’re willing to spend on a shift each day. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time, however, so The Alters generates a lot of its engaging tension from forcing you to sweat through making tough decisions to balance both survival and the happiness of the workforce that enables it.

The stories that manifest from this tug-of-war between the needs of your crew and the needs of the mission are the most engaging ones that The Alters has to offer. Small but consistent moments of hardship accompany big, nail-biting triumphs at the end of each act, where the difference between moving on and failing can often come down to a handful of hours. There are instances, however, where decisions you made numerous days prior come back to haunt you near the climax. Some poorly spent days can put you into an unrecoverable state that will force you to reload saves and sacrifice some hours to better spend your time, which is frustrating. But it does make each victory feel hard-earned, especially with all the tough decisions and delicate micro-management you navigated along the way.

That isn’t to say that each moment in The Alters is engaging. Some days will be spent at a workbench or a mining station, holding down a button and watching the hours peel away as you complete a job you couldn’t have an alter complete for you. Exploration on the planet’s surface is required to find new spots to construct mining stations, but actually nailing down the areas where these can be placed involves tedious minigames that feel purposefully designed to waste time. Surface exploration is also governed heavily by your spacesuit’s battery, and requires you to plan your exploration around detours back to base or between mining stations to recharge it.

The Alters light combat is also an uneven addition to surface exploration. Near-invisible enemies of different varieties populate the land around your base, with some damaging you with radiation if you pass through them, while others can dilate time and steal precious hours from your day. Early on, enemies are easy enough to carefully move around, but as you progress, they become more aggressive and increasingly more dangerous, with some able to knock you out (and waste your day) with a single misstep. You can eliminate enemies entirely with a light-emitting weapon to charge and destroy glowing orbs at their centers, which makes subsequent expeditions easier, but this is tied to the same suit battery system that already limits your overall movement around the surface. With the pressure of managing both resources and hours in the day, the addition of this battery management to exploration feels punitive and punishing, and ends up being more frustrating than engaging to overcome.

The moral dilemmas and confronting moments created by manufacturing and living with alternate versions of yourself is a captivating narrative that The Alters delivers on, creating moments of emotional and mechanical tension by balancing its various management systems atop one another. It paves the way for some nail-biting victories and memorable interactions, but is also hampered by occasional tedium and needlessly frustrating exploration that is governed too heavily by a single resource. Still, the plight of Jan Dolski and his mission to get home is one that is bound to be very different for each player of The Alters, and is a stressful adventure I won’t soon forget.