Salvaged Home Loans
HIGH Turning scrap into a ship.
LOW Progress. Bars.
WTF How are all batteries so anemic?
Ostranauts bills itself as a difficult, top-down role-playing, noir space survival that begins with salvaging space hulks but could end with an asteroid base to call my own.
My foray into this stylized world began with the conspicuously-labeled manual on the main menu. A beautifully informative binder filled my eyes as faux air traffic calls echoed in the background further immersing me. It humorously explained mechanics in some detail, but I did find some contradicting information between the manual and a new tutorial, found in the upper left corner of the screen.
After thoroughly reading for half an hour, I started a new game and was steeped in a stylish character creation process that reminded me of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book mixed with a table-top character sheet. Some skill descriptions were obtuse with no explanations, but I picked a few important things like cooking and firearms before being offered a petite salvage tug for a mere $800,000 and beginning my heavily-indebted shipbreaker life.
I woke in my room on K-Leg station to the newer tutorial repeating itself. As I ran through it, the inventory system slammed into me like a chunk of orbital debris. The constant clicking and maneuvering of items gave me flashbacks of the worst inventory systems in nearly three decades. Worse, any open-able item had a sub-inventory that added to micromanagement hell. This inventory realism unfortunately added immense tedium.
The stylish, button-heavy piloting interface on my tug nailed an ’80s sci-fi vibe. My fingers danced excitedly on the controls as I requested my departure clearance, and after a short familiarization flight to the tutorial wreckage, training on obstacles was presented to me. I learned to use my PDA to rewire power and used a scientist-approved crowbar to pry open doors and crates, all while waiting for progress bars. I also realized walls could be deconstructed (after a progress bar) to circumnavigate obstacles. All the container-searching and salvaging required time management as my pressure suit contained only a few minutes of oxygen, and the back-and-forth for just a bit of progress grew tiring.
I stuffed my tiny tug with loot and returned to K-Leg to sell it all. The elation over earnings was short-lived as docking fees and my mortgage took almost all of it. I did not earn enough to renew the soon-to-expire salvage license the tutorial gifted me. This budgeting complexity was similar to real-life financial decision making, and it felt beautifully horrifying knowing that finances would be difficult.
Before returning to the salvaging fields, I tried to improve my character’s mental state. Conversations with other characters were handled through a turn-based, progress bar-driven system. Selected topics could increase or decrease moods as discussions continued, but the mood bars and their impact confused me, and I never fully understood how mood impacted my character. While investigating these conversations, my PDA beeped with a request to find salvage for a previously-unknown acquaintance. I quizzically accepted and hurried off K-Leg before my license expired.
I found a new wreck and used salvaged components to expand my ship. A tedious real hour of watching progress bars and oxygen management later, I had a small ship expansion. I went to wire up the new section for electricity and fire broke out between progress bars installing the cables. I used the fire extinguisher (with progress bar) but the fire kept burning, and then it began burning in places I couldn’t reach because of default item placement. In an act of desperation I vented atmosphere from the ship to suffocate the fire, but it kept burning in the vacuum. Slack-jawed, I reloaded my doomed save.
I returned to K-Leg to sell my haul and the questgiver unexpectedly greeted me on my ship. I handed in the requested quest items then he promptly exited a station airlock and suffocated. Other station crew soon followed him like lemmings. I left the madhouse station while the debug log screamed about errors. I tried restarting the game, only for it to lock up.
As I grew more familiar with the simulation, I discovered more things that wore me down. For example, component degradation could happen in unreachable locations of my ship. I tried repositioning components via lengthy progress bars, but moving the transponder destroyed it without warning. I tried fixing the temperature in the ship, but the automatic heater never worked. The next sixteen real hours were just an extended stay in a progress bar-laden hell.
In a last-ditch attempt at settling in, I tried to use an in-game Autotask system to avoid watching progress bars but it lacked granular control when issuing orders, requiring me to open the task menu and tediously cancel unwanted orders, while also causing my character to sometimes leave the ship without a helmet…
Ostranauts offers beautiful presentation, solid audio design, and a lovingly-crafted world filled with buggy, incomplete systems and an underlying design that commits the ultimate videogame sin — watching all these progress bars and getting nickel-and-dimed by a million aggravations is less engaging than doing my household chores in real life.
Rating: 3 out of 10
— John Powell
Disclosures: This game was developed by Blue Bottle Games and published by Kitfox Games. This copy was obtained via Publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 20 hours were devoted to the single-player mode and the game was not completed. There is no multiplayer mode.
Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. The opening splash screen displayed content warnings for flashing lights and mature topics. An approximate rating of M for Mature 17+ appears accurate for the subject matter, in this reviewer’s opinion.
Colorblind Modes: No colorblind modes are available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All interface elements are in text formats. There are auditory alarms that also display a visual alert only when the alarm is functional. For example, if the oxygen alarm is non-functional, then no alert is displayed to the player when an oxygen problem exists. This game is not fully accessible. The only interface and written text options at the time of review was English.
Remappable Controls: This game offers fully remappable keyboard and controller inputs. The game was tested on a Steam Deck since the game is also Steam Deck verified. However, the Steam Deck controller input would randomly stop working.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
