Endless Sky

I have over Over 600 hours on this game. It is free, fun and addictive. Nice atmosphere to this universe. Do you like games with ‘grinding’? It doesn’t feel like grinding however. Every gain feels like 'leveling up'. Each planet has a story. No guns required. But you can shoot your way through the game. You can just trade and upgrade, pay off your debt, or accumulate more. Mining is an option. It plays on linux, macos, and windows. It feels very polished. I always wondered why they never charged for it. It is obviously a labor of love as they still update it! One of my favorite games. My only gripe was the save menu. It was not intuitive to me.

If you played Escape Velocity Nova back in the day, this game is pretty much exactly that but open source, with higher resolution graphics, an original setting and story, a bigger galaxy, modern QoL features and very easy to use modding capabilities. The game is in active development but is already fully playable, with a 10 hours long main campaign. Besides that, there are also at least two long campaigns that follow the main one that are currently in development, as well as several shorter side-stories all over the galaxy map. Only thing I would say it's missing is a custom soundtrack like the other open-source EV Nova-like game, Naev.

I probably have a couple hundred hours at least sunk into this game's mobile port. This is one of the best space games I've played, and probably one of the best space captain sims out there. 10/10, I'd highly recommend giving it a shot.

TLDR: When I was about to get bored from the game and give it some 2 stars and a "meh" review, it turned out to be one of the best games I played in a year. Do not play this game as just another 2D space shooting/trading sandbox (that is how it feels at first). Play it as a story rich space exploration game that it truly is. It is easy to miss some of the great campaigns that are started by some average looking missions from the spaceport. It would be great if the first "tutorial" mission series ended with the old retiring captain saying something along the lines of "Good luck in your travels youngster. If You are looking for a great adventure stop by the spaceport on XYZ." Because I spent the first hours just playing the game as an average space sandbox doing randomly generated missions with some small single missions from the spaceports that were hand written and were just a tiny taste of what was to come, when I completely by random stumbled upon a galaxy altering hand-written campaign with dozens of missions. It had a great storyline, plot twists and great characters.

This game reminds me of my time in a dark room playing a freeware game called Transcendance. This one seems to offer more to do overall but giving a simple yet fun experience romping through the space and having fun