The Alters occupied an unusual space amongst the nominees at The Game Awards this year. Listed alongside more conventional strategy and simulation titles, 11 bit studios’ sci-fi management game didn’t fit neatly into its Best Sim/Strategy Game category, and that pull between expectation and execution has always defined it.
The game ultimately didn’t win, but the nomination itself recognized a project whose most ambitious mechanics aren’t about efficiency or systems, but about narrative depth and performance.
I spoke with Alex Jordan, who voices every version of Jan Dolski in The Alters, about the challenge of performing a game built around identity and uncertainty: an experience that mirrors the project’s refusal to fit neatly into any one genre.
A Management Game Built On Identity, Not Optimization
The Alters revolves around the aforementioned Jan Dolski, a stranded worker forced to survive on a hostile planet by creating alternate versions of himself, ‘Alters’, using a quantum computer. Each Alter represents a life Jan could have lived, shaped by a single decision made differently. All eleven versions are voiced by Jordan, whose performance carries the emotional weight of the game’s premise.
Looking back on The Game Awards, Jordan is pragmatic rather than disappointed. For him, the visibility mattered more than the outcome.
While “[the nomination] was really cool”, he says The Alters is difficult to pin down precisely because “there’s no way of clearly genre-defining this game”. It exists, he says, “within strategy, it exists within resource and base building, it exists within narrative.” That breadth can make it hard for players to know what they’re signing up for. “I just hope that some people might have seen its name on that list and go, ‘Okay, so it made it onto the… I might just give that a go, actually.’”
That uncertainty about genre, tone, even intent, is intentional. Many players come to The Alters expecting a management game, only to discover something far more intimate beneath the surface. What begins as a logistical challenge gradually becomes a psychological one, shaped by conversations between Jan and his Alters that are restrained and often unsettling.
Performing Eleven Lives That All Belong To One Man
For Jordan, that balance between mechanical challenge and emotional authenticity made the role unlike anything he had done before. “There’s the obvious challenge,” he says. “This is many, many roles. And they’re all the same person, so how do you believably feel as though this is one tree trunk with multiple branches?” Each Alter had to feel distinct without ever breaking the illusion that they all originate from the same source.
But that technical difficulty, he says, was only part of the equation. “There’s the other challenge of it,” Jordan continues, “which is a lot of the subject matter.” Beyond the mechanics, the game asks players to engage with deeply personal themes. “We’re dealing with this abusive household that he grew up in, this sort of feeling of regret, this feeling of ‘what if.’”
Jordan recalls attending a hands-on event in Warsaw where that emotional weight became impossible to ignore. “There was a content creator out there who played the game […] and he was crying,” he says. “He was like, ‘This is extremely close to home. I feel like I’m literally playing through a portion of my life.’”
Moments like that represent the responsibility behind the performance. “Not only are we dealing with a technical challenge,” Jordan adds, “but we’ve also got a challenge to deal with this subject matter in a way that for people feels reflective of their own experiences and accurate to their own experiences, but also delicately handled.”
That sensitivity is reflected in Jan himself, who stands in sharp contrast to the power fantasies that dominate many games. Jan is haunted, insecure, and deeply uncertain of his own worth. Even after learning that the quantum computer actively chose him, he struggles to understand why.
His strength, Jordan explains, comes from an unusual place. “Jan’s strength is his ability over time to face his lack of strength.” While doubt is common in protagonists, “for that to be the fundamental core of who they are. That was a totally unique experience.”
Ethics Without Answers And A Performance That Lingers
That vulnerability extends outward to the Alters themselves, who frequently question Jan’s decisions and authority. The game forces players to confront the ethics of creation: is it justifiable to bring sentient beings into existence solely to increase your own odds of survival?
For Jordan, those questions felt uncomfortably relevant. “Do you know what’s really interesting?” he says. “That kind of feels like bringing a child into the world at the moment.”
He draws a parallel between the game’s premise and the anxieties of modern life. “There’s people talking about potential wars. There’s people talking about climate change, a million different things that make you go, ‘Why would you bring a person into the world right now, other than for your own personal love and gratification?’”
The Alters refuses to offer clean moral answers. The Alters challenge Jan’s choices, but they also depend on him. Their desires often conflict, forcing compromises that benefit no one completely. “There is no black and white,” Jordan says. “There is no right answer. There’s just different degrees of personal benefit.”
Some of the game’s most powerful moments emerge not during its largest crises, but during its quietest conversations. Despite the sci-fi spectacle and looming planetary collapse, the exchanges between Jan and his Alters feel intimate rather than theatrical.
Jordan attributes that intimacy partly to his own approach in the recording booth. “A lot of the time, when I want to react authentically, I almost empty my head of everything,” he says. “I have a moment of stillness, and then I go into the scene.” That stillness, combined with isolation in the booth, helped ground the performance. “It’s just going into it with a really genuine want to just talk to the other person.”
At the same time, he’s quick to praise the rest of the development team for shaping those moments. “I think there’s a large part of that to give credit to the design team,” he says, pointing to the way conversations visually pull focus inward. “It felt like the world around kind of disappears into black, and you are just focused on this person here now and this conversation.”
Behind the scenes, the performance was further complicated by the game’s non-linear structure. A scene that plays late in the story for one player might appear near the beginning for another. Emotional continuity had to remain flexible.
“You could take one Alter in a conversation where they are experiencing this big rush,” Jordan says, “and at the end of that conversation, that could feed into another dialogue tree where suddenly he’s really sad. I could never fully commit to a totally happier euphoric moment.” That constant recalibration, he says, “keeps a constant thread between every single line in the game.”
It’s the kind of work that rarely translates cleanly into awards recognition, precisely because it resists spectacle. Still, Jordan believes The Game Awards nomination mattered as acknowledgment of experimentation.
“I genuinely think there are things that happen in this game that will make people go, ‘I’ve never- whoa, this feels new,’” he says. “I don’t think there is another game in which a person plays multiple versions of the same person.”
Five years from now, Jordan doesn’t hope The Alters is remembered for the award it didn’t win. Instead, he hopes it’s remembered for what it changed. “What I hope is that we see games further down the line where you’ll go, ‘Oh, this has a flavor of The Alters about it,’” he says. “That’s always, I think, the coolest thing.”
He suspects the game will continue to find its audience slowly, through word of mouth rather than awards won. “I think it’s a game that is going to be one that has a continued slow burn life,” Jordan says. “I don’t think it’s going to disappear. I think it’s just gonna keep churning away.”
In that sense, The Alters didn’t lose at The Game Awards. It simply revealed how much further games can still go, and how quietly some of the most meaningful innovation already arrives.
The Alters
- Released
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June 13, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Use of Drugs and Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
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11 Bit Studios
- Publisher(s)
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11 Bit Studios
