Deep Space Exploitation

Heaps of fun

I give this a thumbs up because it's an interesting story and setting, but the gameplay is a punishing, boring grind. It has the unfair feeling of Papers, Please. But it has a lot less to say.

A great little game! A perfect companion to ΔV: Rings of Saturn.

Hidden gem for spacesim fans

Very short but very fun!

Surprisingly fun and deep despite simple appearances

Excellent

This was a cute little game. Played through twice. Controls and physics felt great. This is in the vein of the classic top-down space shooters like Asteroids or Mine Storm, in terms of how easy it is to take it in hand. Contrary to these two games, the gameplay is usually chill. There's a good variety of mining tools, and a few different types of missions. Each mission plays in a few minutes only, but often you can just take your time and go at it as slowly as you wish to. Some missions have time limits but they're not very strictly enforced. There isn't any real combat. You can die, but it's not very punishing at all unless you're playing ironman difficulty of course. In other difficulties, you can simply restart the mission if you die and lose nothing. The content is not a lot, but it's well polished. As far as I'm concerned it's appropriate to the price point. The story is a bit one-note. Without going into spoilers, you can go along with being a corporate drone, or you can be a bit of a hooligan with company property. I do wish there was a more marked fork in the mission path depending on your actions. There are some minor improvements I'd like to see: - the main menu should offer a 'Continue' option that loads the most recent save. - it would be nice if there were some non-campaign, 'sandbox' type missions to let you play a bit more with some of the tools you can equip on the ship (it's probably possible to do this through save-scumming at the right places through the campaign right now but I haven't looked into it) After spending 9-10 hours with the game I'm probably done with it, but I'll certainly come back if there's new content or just to give it another spin one of these days.

tldr: This is a cute, little indie game. While it does nothing ground breaking, I still really enjoyed my time. It took me ~4h to finish a story run. I found this game via its demo during Steam Next Fest. It reminded me of 'Rings of Saturn', but much more arcady. You control a small mining ship and use your tools and equipment to dig up chunks of crystals to sell them back at your home station. This money is then used to buy new supplies, upgrades and pay back your ridiculous loan. The story has been told before, but I still quickly rooted for my favorite faction and might have gonve beyond my assignments (and budget at times) to 'disable' company equipment. It also had one or two exciting moments. I met two characters and while the contact was short, they still felt relatable. The gameplay is simple, but fun. The upgrades are meaningfull and something to strive towards, although I neaver really had any money problems. Maybe that's because I refused to pay back any loaned money. There were a couple challanges and with perma death mode they would have killed me. To sum this up, I recommend the game.

very fun and original has some papers please vibes physics are lovely and silly theme is great gameplay is fun and enjoyable space physics boom kapow makes brain happy