ALONE IN SPACE

I got this game hoping for an interesting expore-a-spaceship kind of game. The screenshots looked really interesting and I was eager to play it. What I got was pretty much what eveyone's said ... a maze of corridors. Repetative environments. Lots and lots of boxes. The puzzles are of the variety of 'find the object and put it in a thing' or those sliding tile puzzles that are kind of obnoxious. I finally got to a really complex sliding tile puzzle that I couldn't solve after quite a bit of trying, found myself stuck in the corridor, and got sick of it. I went to YouTube to see if it's worth finishing the game -- spoilers, it's really super duper NOT worth it. I really wanted to like this game -- I really, really wanted to like this game. But I just can't ... it kind of sucks. It "feels like" the developers padded this game to make it extra long. And I'm pretty sure the ending will disappoint everyone who's got the fortitude to put up with the long walk. It probably would be a lot more fun at about half the size, if I had finished the game in 4 hours instead of gotten frustrated by an obnoxious puzzle (... or maybe if the puzzles were more varied instead of just increasingly complicated sliding tiles) ... I think I would have liked this game a lot more.

[update at bottom] I've played about 3 hrs of this game. It's a lot of samey corridors and crates. So many corridors in this terraforming base, so many crates. There are a few offices and bedrooms (I guess) and some store rooms for variety but everything generally looks the same. The environment is very, very bare bones, not much detail. Exploration is not a driving force of this game. I did get stuck once among some crates, so be careful where you jump about. (edit: may be fixed in future patches.) The corridors are often maze like and everything is so samey looking that it's easy to get disoriented and discover yourself running around in circles once you've opened up enough doors in some sections. There's a bit of a story that's told in fairly decent English (I've seen worse) but it seems pretty generic. There's some puzzle solving, most of which is fairly simple. There are at least 2 sliding piece puzzles. I hate those with a passion. I'm currently stuck on the 2nd one. [strike]I don't think I'm going to spend any more time on it. The game is just not compelling enough to warrant the effort.[/strike] edit: (well, since I bought it...) It's been stable for me, no crashes. [strike]Also, at the time of this review you can rebind some keys, but not movement keys. If you don't use a standard QWERTY keyboard know how to switch keyboards on your OS.[/strike] Edit: key binding for movement keys seems to have been fixed in an update. I got past the one troublesome (for me) puzzle and finished the game, which took about 5 hrs total. This game is more "escape the situation" than walking simulator or exploration game. Not much story but enough to explain what is going on. Decent enough if you are into that type of game. For the price, compared to other $10-15 games, I thought content was lacking a bit.

puzzles are ok, not hard at all. boring story, only in text sound design is a bit bad, like no sounds for doors that are opening feedback on buttons is minimal to unnoticable no quicksaves the thing that i hated the most, is the buttons. You have to stand allmost inside the button to click it or get the prompt to use it. NOT RECOMMED IT

Well I was hoping for a neat puzzle/adventure style game. You really have to not have a short attention span for this - I don't mean that in a "only smart people with focus can beat this game" I mean it in a "this game is kinda boring" way. Lot of exploring but the environment is too barren for this to be interesting for long. The puzzles are sparse and not especially clever or challenging. The game doesn't make the best use of the space, the story is without any depth or relevance and I think I beat the game but it certainly didn't do any job of telling me that I had aside from bringing me back to the main menu in a different way to death. I won't reccomend this.

Alone in space is a minimalistic, well optimized, first person puzzle game with functional, nice looking graphics, without music and voice acting. But this is part of the game design and it doesn’t distract the atmosphere at all. The story is told by computer terminal log files only. There are 20 sections, each of them need to be completed at once. (Auto save at the beginning of each level.) If you die at the end of a level, you have to start all over again. But if you are carefully, it’s not a big deal. (mostly) All puzzles are logical and overall easy to solve. It is up to you whether 6-7 hours of gameplay is worth the price, or not. For me it is a clear recommendation. Update: The last level is pretty challenging (tough puzzles & huge maze) and the end is not satisfactory... but still didn't change my mind.

I got it at a discount, and it still feels like I've been ripped off. "Immersive story"; what a lie. The background is entirely told through texts on screen. Sometimes, that text plays a role in solving the next "puzzle"... in that it tells you you need a bomb, which you find on Oliver's desk. No need to tell you who Oliver is and where his desk is! Just do what you've been doing for hours already: Run around until you find something useful. Be careful not to die, or you have to retrieve everything again. Not that it's worth the effort. Because you wanna know how the game ends? [spoiler]You escape in a ship, but your cryosleep pod fails and you die.[/spoiler] Yeah. Just like that. Even "it was a simulation/dream all along" would've been better than that. Long story short, don't burden your wallet with this trash.

I don't think this game was incredible, but it wasn't as bad as some of the other reviews make it sound. Sure, it has issues. Early on you get to look out a window and see a large satellite dish beyond a wind-blown dusty landscape, which was enticing, but it's just decoration - you never do leave the corridors. There's also not really that much adventure except for getting killed by the randomly-timed lightning). The locations are also a little bare - a few signs would have been nice, for instance, even if just for decoration. But the story, while fairly light, was interesting, and the resolution isn't as silly as some of the other reviews claim (I don't know how to do spoilers here but I'm pretty sure it only has one ending which is just vague enough to misinterpret). I enjoyed the logic puzzles, and wouldn't have minded a few more. There's not much backtracking - you might have to hunt around a little but you're never going to discover you forgot to pick up something three autosaves earlier. The graphics were pleasant, and the physics system was surprisingly functional for a game that didn't even need one. And most importantly, it kept me entertained while I listened to audio from another program. So if you want a game that doesn't rely much on sound and doesn't need your full attention (hint - the maze 'left/right-hand-rule' will get you through most of the segments), and don't mind a few gaming cliches... this isn't too bad. Plus it's short - I had the game alt-tabbed a lot; my real completion time was a little over three hours. I did pick up a memory disk early in the game and never found anywhere to use it, though. I wonder what that was about. (Edit: Mystery solved.)

I think ALONE IN SPACE is beautiful game with puzzles. Controls are very simple and puzzles aren't so complicated so every kind of people can play this game. If you want to practice your brain cells and explore space base, be sure to buy this game. And don't worry, It's not so scary as you think.

I did not mind most of the things other people complain about this game: being soul-less, same corridors everywhere, lack of music, etc. What I did mind is although none of the puzzles are really hard, 2 or 3 of them were more "complex" versions of the previous puzzles, which again aren't hard, but more time consuming, time consuming to the point it gets annoying. Sure the game levels are "samey" but at least it feels like you are doing something by moving through them and making progress but when you are spending minutes in one place on a puzzle that isn't hard just time consuming it makes it feel like the devs did it on purpose to "pad" the game length. The only other thing I did not like was the ending was very much a let down. There is about 100 different ways you could have ended the game in a good way, but apparently the devs weren't able to get any of those ideas into the game. There is a situation at the end where it seems you can effect the ending. However, the last save checkpoint before you finish the game has the 2 most tedious puzzles in the entire game, and it doesn't feel worth trying them out for a different ending. In any case, according to the discussion forums a few people tried at least one different method but got the same ending. In short, if the game had not padded out a couple of the puzzles and made a even decent ending (wasn't even expecting great or amazing plot twist) then it the game might be worth it. But as it stands now, I don't think it is worth playing through. The space station exploration is simple but still enjoyable for a chill sci-fi mood, sadly a few of the puzzles and ending ruin the entire experience. In other words the negatives ruin any positives this game has, so I recommend not getting the game.

This was a really bad execution of what could have been a decent game. Let me go through this quickly cause I've already wasted too much time on this game as it is. -Puzzles aren't hard but your progress is slowed significantly by a number of tedious-to-navigate death zones in the form of lightning clouds. You get through these by tossing something metallic through them to find the safe path. (Not all of them HAVE safe paths! Some are just there to usher you down another hall). Alternatively you have a second type of death zone which involves you running through areas with randomly arcing insta-kill lightning. (There is no pattern or indicators that will help you through these. You simply have to run through and hope the dice rolls are on your side.) -When the game isn't infuriating you with cheap lightning it's practicing blandness in the extreme. 95% of the areas in the game are hallways that look exactly the same. For example, there's a picture on the store page of a room with trees. That's literally the ONE and only room in the whole game with trees. -The base is large just for the sake of being large. It fails to justify it's size in both design and content. -The puzzles are the least painful part of this game. And they're just average. Not annoying, but not particularly memorable. Most of them are a tile-style thing where you need to make a complete circuit between point A and point B. -The story is told through logs you find on computer consoles and without spoiling anything it utterly fails at hitting any sort of satisfying conclusion. The game just kind of ends. Which is super disappointing given that it seemed off to an interesting start. I'm rarely this brutal in a review. Even in games I don't recommend I almost always try to find some good aspects, because honestly, most games DO have some redeeming qualities, even if they aren't worth it. But this? I lost six hours of my life playing this game and I've never felt so robbed. :( TLDR: [Not Worth it, at ANY price] Suggestion: I've played several much shorter sci-fi exploration-type games that were vastly superior to this because of how well they used their time. If you're looking for something similar but much better executed, you may want to consider: CAT Interstellar, (Free) Verde Station, (Free) Spirits of Xanadu, (cheaper) The Station (more, but a much better deal) All these games are a vastly better deal in terms of both time and money.