It's an interesting project that's for sure. I love the idea. ASCII space exploration roguelike ticks a lot of my boxes. I'm going to give it a very tentative thumbs up because it's obviously a labor of love and it's still very new (this review is version 1.1) so there's the chance of some substantial updates to come, but that thumbs up comes with some reservations, which you should read because this game is definitely not for the faint of heart. It's cheap, and it's interesting, and it's worth it to me, but I think a lot of people will struggle with the issues below even more than I am.
First of all, the game provides little to no guidance or hand-holding. That alone isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in combination with some of the rest of the comments I'm going to make, it becomes a major problem. All you get is a simple help screen that tells you the controls (neither rebindable nor remotely ergonomic, using arrow keys instead of wasd, only a bare handful of controls sprinkled randomly across the keyboard) and an ominous threat that you should try not smashing into planets when landing on them. Which ironically turns out to actually be impossible, even if the game did explain how to, which it doesn't, figure it out yourself, gamer. Also when it says 1000 days what it really means is 1000 turns, that's your limit. Each ship movement or change in velocity counts as a turn, so turns start to rack up really quickly. I'm not a big fan of time limited games and wish there was an option to turn that off, the game is already challenging enough for me without the additional time pressure.
The "tough it out, princess" attitude extends to the RNG which is absolutely punishing and unforgiving. The game has zero remorse at having an anomaly throwing you next to a hostile starbase and three battleships that will instantly annihilate you. This is not a freak occurrence, this is a regular feature of this game's style of RNG. It hates you and wants you to die. It will give up rewards only grudgingly and at risk of great peril. It does not care about you and it is only a matter of time before it stabs you in the back.
This wouldn't be so bad if you could at least somehow analyze and weigh the risks of various actions and consider different actions, but there doesn't seem to be any tools to even try to do that. There's no scanner to get information about an object or anomaly, and even if you could do that, typically the only actions you have available are weapons and a communication transmitter that seems nearly useless, any ship I've found to communicate with either wants money that I don't have to be hired as an escort (rare), or ignores all attempts at communication and tries to kill me (like 90% of the time). You start the game with almost no useful options and the only way to start to gain access to more options is through luck. And remember, the RNG hates you. You cannot leave the starter system (which may be a murderous system full of pirates) until you've taken enough risks to get rewarded with coordinates to a new system you can jump to or randomly been thrown into one. The new system is probably also going to try to kill you, and may just instantly kill you the moment you arrive, so it's not really much of an improvement, but once again, sometimes you get lucky. The RNG still hates you.
Landing on planets is impossible without damaging your ship, and the only results I've had from attempting to do so range from nothingburger "you don't find anything" to "oops you tripped an alarm and an enemy ship is now on its way" to the most interactive event I found which is "oh no one of your crew is being eaten by monsters, would you like to leave him to die or send 10 additional crew to also be eaten by monsters?"
When it happens at an appropriate time, the ship-to-ship combat itself, like other reviews mentioned, is quite neat and due to the maneuvering and firing arcs can be surprisingly tactical, at least until you get brutalized by the RNG (you will, it's inevitable). You do start with a decent slate of weaponry, it turns out, although the game never really explains enough for you to be able to appreciate that. Almost everyone in this universe seems to hate you, much like the RNG.
The UI is generally clunky and inscrutable. Faint question marks in the background of stars seem to be anomalies, so look out for those. Unlike something like Dwarf Fortress, where if multiple ASCII icons occupy the same tile, it will flash between them, here things like the arrow pointing where your ship is going will completely obscure whatever's in that tile, so it can be hard to see and understand if you're going to collide with something or not. And randomly for some screens you have to use the mouse, there are no keyboard controls, it's all a bit jarring, it's workable once you figure it out but it's not ideal.
I will add some more details if either patches come out to address any of these things or if the savage RNG ever allows me to get further into the game. It's worth the price, but only if you're willing to tolerate some of the above frustrations.
