Objects in Space

I'm only about 3 hours in and haven't even experienced any real combat, but I already love this game. It's like playing a 2d 80s space game like Starflight inside of a mid 90s 3D game. Your main control screens are all simple 2D monitors inside of a 3D ship. The gameplay is a lot like Escape Velocity, but you spend your time inside the ship instead of on the world map. Buy cargo or take on missions at the port, set all your navs, then you can feel free to wander around your ship, read the news and email, tinker with energy settings, then go OH CRAP when alarms go off and try and go dark in a nebula. I'll update this review with further thoughts, but so far this is great. It's not a straight action space game, more of a slow complex one, but it has plenty of atmosphere and looks great with its 80s/90s blend.

This game is sort of a mixture of Wing Commander Privateer and Silent Service. You'll spend a lot of quiet time staring at the nav map hoping that it stays quiet. Unfortunately the game has quite a few issues in its current state. The dialogue is loaded with unnecessarily vulgar language and typos, it crashes often. Also, although the NPCs speak a variety of languages and appear to come from a mixture of all of Earth's backgrounds, every NPC in the game I've seen in hours of play is dark-skinned. Not sure if that was just an odd design choice or if it was meant to convey some kind of message. The trading needs to be rebalanced. Docking fees and jump fees quite often wash out your profit, and where to taking particular types of goods to sell high doesn't seem to have a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it (e.g. some space stations need water and oxygen, some don't). It needs a lot of work, but I wish more games of this kind were made, so I hope they stick with it.

I had no idea about this absolute gem until a tweet from someone I follow who was working on it clue'd me in. What a treat - I never got into submarine sims like Silent Hunter but I do love me a good space/ space trader game and this hits a lot of my boxes. Apply within if you want a fun sandbox to play in with lots of incredible points of immersion and some truly eclectic NPCs and wordbuilding and some intense stealth-oriented ship to ship combat.

If hauling freight in your clunky spaceship sounds fun, you might enjoy it as much as I do. It's relaxing for the most part, but very tense at times. Gave me some new job anxiety the first time a siren went off or a red light started flashing on my console, and I had no idea why. This is about the machinery of space travel, which is something few games tackle in detail. The various displays and systems are suitably arcane until you learn them, and become easier to use with experience. I think they did a great job with the onboarding process. There's a fairly comprehensive encyclopedia in-game, but individual concepts are doled out organically over time, as well. The soundscape is one of my favorite parts. The various ship systems are borderline ASMR, to the point where I could easily fall asleep listening to the machinery on my bridge. At least until the next time a sensor ghost turns out to be a pirate, and alarms start going off. There's a surprising amount of writing for a sandbox game, through dialogue, emails, and news reports. Most of it feels grounded and well-written, though there are some articles that look like they needed more editing. At first, I was a bit disappointed to realize that you don't really navigate the ships and stations in 3D. Instead, it's a series of loosely related, fixed scenes, a la Wing Commander. But every station seems to have a unique look, and there are a lot of them. I thought it might ruin the physicality of the space, but now that I'm used to it, it doesn't bother me at all. I think the only thing I would've changed in the game is the system for repairing ship modules. You get to look at the actual circuit board, but only through a monitor. I wish they had given the circuits their own screens, so it felt more like I was repairing the thing myself.

Really enjoying the game so far. Old school, info dense, "run silent run deep" sub game. The way a space game should be. All the bugs mentioned in the development reviews seam to have been ironed out.