I'm pleasantly reminded of FTL, among others, and the game mechanics are fantastic. TLDR, Buy it.
Main differences between Link and FTL:
- Space combat -> squad combat,
- Dialogue-tree missions with narrative text -> Squad combat missions, trying not to die of exposure or raiders
- Journeying through space -> Protecting your base, and gathering resources from nearby
- Brave Spaceman Seeking Danger On An Adventure -> Tired Spacemen Trying Not To Freeze Or Starve Or Get Murdered By Snow Jawas And Their Stompy Robot Spiders
- New game : Choose what ship to play each game with -> New Game : Choose team-members and victory conditions
- Unlock new team members instead of new ship types
You start with three people in your base / crashed ship. You build different rooms in the space available, which can passively gather resources, or perform useful tasks when you have a person spend their turn there. Your team members can level up and gain abilities from a skill tree, and if they have the right ones they're better at using some buildings than others, or have bonuses in combat. There's a surprising amount of deep and well-balanced resource-balancing strategy here, only some of which I've uncovered.
Your main resources are fuel, food, tools, and knowledge. You also have characters, which spend stamina and heat to perform tasks, health and heat on away missions, and can die if mismanaged, or be rescued and added to your team on some missions. Food is used when characters rest to regenerate stamina, tools and knowledge are used to make buildings and equippable items, fuel is used to heat the furnace room (or the entire base, if you upgrade that room enough). You can upgrade rooms to higher tiers, and some of the higher tiers require access to power, which requires building a power generator next to them and keeping it running via having someone spend their time there every turn.
Away missions seem to fall into three groups -- 1) scavenging for items without freezing to death or getting mauled by bandits, 2) hunting various tiers of badguys to make them less likely to storm your base, 3) trying to escort characters from the wrong side of a map over to the exit zone, so they can join your team. Available missions change slightly over time, so it's worth checking every once in a while. The stamina system takes getting used to, though. Every combat turn, you regenerate as much stamina as you had left at the end of last turn -- so sure, you can technically do four things in a turn if you want, but if you do you'll be limited to doing one a turn until you take a few turns to sit still and breathe and let your stamina regenerate. Meanwhile, everyone who paced themselves is doing two things a turn all fight, because they paced themselves... ...but sometimes, if an enemy has just one hit left, it's worth it to spend the extra stamina just to kill them before they can attack you again. Or is it? Combat also involves an armor stat, melee and ranged attacks, weapons and armor and trinkets that you have to figure out how to craft all by yourself, and of course various special abilities you can spend XP on when characters level up.
And then there's the laboratory building, where you can research all kind of things that give you special benefits to any of the above systems -- like having your heat meters all go down half as fast, or having all buildings produce twice as much of their resource type.
What I'm trying to say is that they did a very good job of keeping the core number of variables simple (food, fuel, tools, knowledge, buildings, and characters that can do stuff at buildings), and then adding all kinds of very reasonable upgrades and complications for people who know how to make it work. The only thing in between me and the very difficult victory conditions is my own lack of knowledge of the game -- but I'm learning and improving every time, and every loss I've had is because of a choice I made, and not bad luck. The unlockables provide a nice goal to reach too -- someday, I'll have unlocked every character, and done every victory condition at least once.
