Space Order Mine

A very nice mashup of a few genres. Reverse minesweeper combined with an inventory game and turn-based combat. The balance is off, you still get mostly common crappy items even in the final stages, events are weird and non-impactful, and it needs ChatGPT to go over its English, but these don't really affect the enjoyment much. I recommend you try it and hope we get a much improved sequel with a lot more replayability, because there is certainly a lot of potential here.

A very well designed game that combines different mechanics in a new and clever way. As a result there are fun tactical decisions between offense, defense and energy economy to be made. Item variety is good and led to fairly different builds for me so far. My biggest problem is I get so absorbed in minesweeping for energy that I forget the enemies shooting at me .. oops xD

If you like minesweeper, but feel like it needs more upgrades and spaceship combat, this game is for you!

I want to like this game. The idea is solid. It's Backpack Heroes plus Minesweeper. That's like chocolate plus peanut butter. It's just not a polished product. The item descriptions use English words but they're so cryptic they might as well not be in Latin. The game makes no effort to explain what many effects do. There is no way to see your load out except when adding to it. And a dozen other tiny things that would bring me back. Instead I'll just go play Backpack Heroes or Minesweeper.

It took me 115 minutes to remember that I don't like Minesweeper!

According to the forums, no new features are planned. That's disappointing because this game is just short of being great, and it sucks to see something that's 95% of the way there basically abandoned because Steam fails to promote smaller games properly. I don't blame devs for not investing in a product that's effectively hidden to all but a small subset of users, it's just how this platform is. I just can't really say this is what people are expecting for the price. The inventory management is well done and seems balanced enough, but ultimately what kills it is the lack of start variety. Your ship is always a simple square shape, and you always start with the same items. This makes new runs very tedious to start, undermining replay value. Since this is structured like a meta-based rather than skill-based roguelite, it suffers further from a lack of metaprogression, deepening the feeling that every run is going to feel the same as all the others. Item and mechanic variety seems adequate but the previous factors make it a moot point because I don't have a third run in me.

No meta-progression: which I knew going in but I'm disclosing it would be better with it. Got the ending in 3.2 hours - single playthrough. One-shot. There are some parts combinations that just make the game downright trivial - which is EXACTLY what we want in a game like this. The minesweeper element keeps the triviality from being too...trivial. So that's new, and I like it. You can't turn off your brain and left-click or what-have-you because the game will punish you for failures in the minesweeper element - which is nowhere near as difficult as, say, Microsoft's Minesweeper.

Alright. It's a small fun game. It's interesting, but there is some obvious balance issues (two drone with exact same effect, but one should be an upgrade ... while some stuff take x3 more space and do the same effect x3, so it's just not an upgrade and so on) that will probably never get fixed. There is also not much content. Just enough for maybe 10 hours, you will quickly try everything and probably fall into the "start a run, grab that OP item and win" because of how OP removing the energy from the enemy's ship is. Seriously, it's super easy to go infinite with it. It's still good, just very short for this type of game.