The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox is a mostly narrative game, so if you don't like reading this almost certainly isn't the game for you, it is also very simple gameplay wise and can be played with only a mouse although there are keys you can use to speed up the overall gameplay. I enjoyed the first few hours / my first playthrough and think if you can buy it during a good sale it would be worth it. I don't think it would be worth full price as the development is dead in the water and the game description makes the gameplay out to be much more intricate than it is. Now for some personal gripes. 1. The game can be a slog to play through, as you will often be just clicking the same few keys for minutes while waiting for something to happen. 2. The game does not have good replay value, you will constantly see events and narrative exposition you have already seen and as this game is almost entirely about building a narrative / story, repetition kills enjoyability. 3. Your actions have less effect than you are led to believe, for example you can make a civilization fully utopian, and it will have the exact same pool of events to pull from as a fully dystopian civilization. This is tagged as a god game but you are very limited in scope of what you can actually do. 4. Devs are very inconsistent with updates although a new update happened recently, whether they keep updating regularly is yet to be seen.

Something about an entire civilisation of people renaming themselves the Filth Porn Commune because their religious commune had a birth rate crisis over VR porn <with a completely straight face> does not sit well with me. It's been FIVE YEARS and we are still in early alpha. Once you have done one playthrough everything feels TOO familiar. There is so many Burned and Prey Ability to do harm takes up a random slot and is treated too much like a valuable recource while recource preservation seemingly has too little impact Civilisations progress too quickly in tech level at times and the whole Dystopian vs Utopian dichotomy is very difficult to control The Recource points you get are not balanced well, dooming an entire civilisation gives you +2 points but not dooming them costs 50 and I am not making those two recource values up You have no control over evolution either, even though that is your job, I just had a game where 5 civilisations popped up on worlds that were not the one world where I was spamming additional recources. The Peace icons are genuinely worthless as loosing population can be really good for recource preservation anyways. The AI civilisations you can spawn are also confusing to interact with The whole civilisation interaction mechanics are also upsetting with everything resulting either in one entity dying out or one entity beeing sent off to colonise with no option for anything else. It's all very Videogamey and samey once you have finished a single run the replayability goes down a lot AND THIS GAME RATES YOU AT THE END WITH DIFFERENT ENDINGS so it is BUILT on replayability.

A ton of variety, but very little depth. As other reviews have pointed out, the gameplay loop is a series of choices that will only ever have three options: obviously good, neutral-ish, and the option that either makes your species evil or kills it or both. That's it. It's less of a game and more of an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure. I still recommend it though. If you go into it knowing that it's a balancing act of how many not-terrible choices you can make with the points you have when the RNG prompts an event, it's chill and the stories that emerge of your different species developing are interesting. A species like us might enter the bronze age on a world like Earth, but what would a species on an ocean world do? What about a plant-like species? A desert world? A flying species? It's fun, imaginative, the little quotes at the bottom of the events are good and often funny, but the 'gameplay' happening is still just [Species] on [World] enters [Technology Stage #X] and will now get events from that category. There's very little agency other than choosing between three options on events that after a while do very much start to repeat. But that's okay sometimes. Maybe I'll make the plant guys be nice to each other next time, because making them worship fire was hilarious but maybe counter productive. Maybe dolphins being the "good" choice of species for that group is silly and they could try ruling the galaxy under their iron fins next time. Maybe the next time I see the asteroid extinction event I'll stop being a softy and let it go off to see what happens. I'm still having fun with the choices I've seen before, even if only to see what happens when you choose sometime else, and there's still plenty I've not seen popping up even after "beating" the game a few times now. Worth getting on sale for sure if that kind of experience appeals to you.

Its a very specific game to fill a very specific niche, but it fills it very well

Long since abandoned. Hard skip.

The insectoids found out how to use obsidian weapons, then made telescopes out of the glass, generated power using volcanos... then shot off into the depths of space using the asteroid belt around the planet as a series of small ships. The birdmen of the dunes were a warrior cast that expelled every thought of religion as dark magic and sat in the early ages of technology amassing a huge population... they treated every crime with the same punishment, 'waterboarding' but with sand... eventually a war broke out and 70% of them died off, allowing them to redevelop technology... there was constant infighting due to their poor ethics until the digital age and the boom of pornography, this settled them down and allowed them to reach space, with porn as their doctorine of governing. The plant people of the ice planet were also slow to develop, however they achieved higher advancement than the insectoids, sadly the rich part of their population became immortal using body swapping, organ harvesting and cybernetic implants... the poor became slaves... The rich striving to do less, developed synthetic organisms to replace mechanical ones... The synthetics deemed the plant people to be a waste of resources as the planet was running thin... an uprising happened, the plant people were expelled from the ice planet and left with what they could into deep space, eventually colonizing two different planets in new sectors. The synths... ... ... They harvested everything they could from the ice planet and left as well, in a different direction... they spread... they harvested... they spread... they harvested... they ran into the dolphin people... they harvested them, they spread, they ran into the bloodsucking lizardman priesthood... they harvested... they spread... they found the insectoids that had left their original planet, and were stuck observing native life in the tau sector... the insectoids there had infiltrated the local government after becoming famous streamers.. The synths took everything... they spread... 10/10 Will play again

This game is in Early Access so this review may be subject to change. The game is ok but not much to do or write home about. You pick a bunch of decisions and hope and pray that you can advance a civilization without going extinct. In order to do this you have to just throw stuff into chaos. You're more like a gardener of a galaxy. Eventually, there gets to be so many things in the galaxy it's hard to keep track of. Many things happen but there's not very much detail or intrigue in all these events. You read a bunch of text about what happened and quickly move on. It's fun to mess around in but the events get repetitive quickly.

If you want a game that is both very chill and capable of filling you with existential dread for your species, this one's perfect.

J'avais acheté ce jeu à la sortie de la bêta et je l'avais déjà beaucoup apprécié à l'époque pour la profondeur des histoires qu'elle générait. J'ai encore un petit serrement au coeur en repensant à ce vaisseau-astéroïde primitif qui a erré tout le long de ma première partie, survivant de justesse à de nombreuses crises mais arrivant à chaque fois trop tard à des destinations déjà occupées par des civilisations plus avancées. Je l'ai ensuite laissé de côté en me promettant de revenir quand il sera en version 1.0 pour l'apprécier pleinement, mais récemment j'ai traversé une période difficile où j'avais besoin d'un jeu apaisant, sans stress, qui me vende du rêve tout en me permettant d'avoir un vrai impact sur la petite et la grande histoire. The Fermi Paradox a été ce jeu-là, je suis toujours émerveillée par la subtilité des textes calibrés pour les différentes espèces et les civilisations qu'elles bâtissent. Je suis sûre qu'à sa sortie officielle ce jeu sera encore plus parfait !

Generally a really good narrative strategy game. its like playing a 4X game as an observer but you can control their RNG and what resources they find. My only complaint is that I wish it was longer with more FTL ages so civilisations had more of a chance to spread out and actually search for life.