Ostranauts Screenshot
Image: Blue Bottle Games & Kitfox Games

As much as I'm looking forward to the upcoming Mass Effect-inspired game based on The Expanse, there's a certain appeal to living the life of an ordinary person in that kind of grungy, industrial future. Enter Ostranauts, leaving early access today, from Blue Bottle Games. Fittingly, it's also published by Kitfox, the folks who put Dwarf Fortress on Steam. Somehow, this might be an even more complex game to learn.

I'd describe the Ostranauts experience as being somewhere between The Sims, Hardspace: Shipbreaker and running a real-life NASA subsidiary on a shoestring budget. You (whoever you choose to be) are a scavenger, with a small spacecraft, a small bank account, and small hopes of finding stability and profit in a graveyard of derelict spacecraft. Initially, the game looks a bit like The Sims, with each character (yourself included) having both physical, mental, and emotional needs met in order to stay in good health.

Things get more complicated the moment you open your inventory. Things get significantly more complex when you look at the navigation panel on your tiny space tugboat. Things get horrifyingly complex when you find the user manual for a fusion reactor. But there's a lot of fun to be had in feeling your way around this deeply simulated world, recruiting a crew of oddballs and managing their wellbeing, and then gearing up with the best cutting and demolitions equipment you can buy to carve up some spaceships.

Did I mention that space is also haunted? Yeah, this is set in the same universe as Blue Bottle's earlier game, the uncompromising roguelike NEO Scavenger. Turns out that while Earth is doing badly, things aren't much better in orbit. The ships that are slowly being reprocessed into living meat might tip you off.

There's no doubt that Ostranauts is a very complex, deeply intimidating game, at least at first. Your initial few characters are likely to die for very silly reasons that no good spacer would ever fall foul of. It's good, then, that to accompany the launch, Kitfox went and commissioned a beginner's guide video from Caelyn Sandel, Ostranauts streamer, super-fan and co-writer on the fantastic Caves Of Qud. Go check it out if you're on the fence.

Ostranauts is out now for £17.75/$20, minus a 20% launch discount. Further savings can be had if you own medieval town sim SAELIG, procedural detective mystery Shadows Of Doubt, or (most fittingly) gritty space combat sim In The Black.