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Ostranauts is a jaw-dropping space sim, trapped in a brutal interfaceAh dinnea ken if I can take any more, Captain
Ah dinnea ken if I can take any more, Captain
Based on its intensely confusing demo, I’ve concluded that I really like everything aboutOstranauts, except for actually playing it. Admittedly that’s a fairly significant obstacle, and it seems I’m not the only person facing it. But it also seems developers Blue Bottle Games are acutely aware of where the pain is coming from, and it looks like they’re holding off on launching into early access until it’s been alleviated a bit. I hope it goes well for them. Because beneath a UI that makes even the simplest task so onerous that it’s not worth bothering with, this is a rich, fiercely imaginative simulation that I’m desperate to fall in love with.
I absolutely thrive on this stuff. I want to go there, and do crime!
As Grahamnotedlast year, this setting comes with some top-notch SF worldbuilding, and every part of the demo drips with it, too. The writing is great. It achieves that thing science fiction so often attempts and so rarely manages, in giving the sense of a world that’s fully realised and consistent with itself, and which will keep about its business whether you happen to be looking into a tiny corner of it or not. You get the sense that wherever you look, you’ll find something interesting.
And in theory, that’s exactly what Ostranauts should allow you to do. After working with it to generate a backstory for your captain, via an interactive fiction minigame of sorts, you’re turfed out into the big wide empty, in the interior of a top-down spaceship, and left to either make your fortune, or simply avoid mortal and/or financial ruin. There are a huge number of destinations to visit (although not many seem to be properly designed at present), and a wealth of activities you can engage in, from smuggling to salvage to piracy to commercial shipping, and everything in between.
I love the backstory generator, to the extent where I suspect it might end up being my favourite part of the game.
Every component and object on your ship is interact-able-with, in an immersive simmy sort of way, and there’s a good deal of the inventory management lols that made their mark so definitively onNEO Scavenger. Pretty much every major function (reactor, navigation, life support etc) can only be operated in an intermediate way, as you click your ostranaut and have them access the controls of the machinery in question. At this point, you’re confronted with a full-screen, in-universe rendering of the control console, complete with baffling dials, readouts and labels (written partially in opaque abbreviations and partially in Chinese characters), which you have to figure out how to use. Nothing, therefore, is simple.
Once you’ve got yourself a crew they’ll join your captain in operating all this gubbins, and will make their home aboard your ship, where they’ll need to eat, shit, breathe, stay warm and so on. They’ll also interact with each other, on the basis of what appears to be an impressively detailed personality modelling system, and do millions of push-ups.Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and other colony simulators are the clear influence here, and from what I can tell, Ostranauts plays out with Rimworld’s mix of direct control and autonomous action, weighted somewhat towards the former. That is to say, you can “possess” crew members to make them do stuff directly, but if you don’t, they’ll fall under the game’s control and ant-farm around according to broader directives or their own whims.
The navigation console: clearly, it’s obvious what to do here in order to make your spaceship go places.
And just as any article on the incredible possibilities of living in space usually ends with a caveat about the near-insurmountable practical difficulties involved, so too must this post. Because doinganythingin Ostranauts is a colossal pain in the arse. I don’t mean the control console stuff - figuring that stuff out is part of the fun, and presses the same, literal, buttons thatNauticrawldid for me. What’s miserable is how convoluted and unintuitive simple actions are.
One of the demo scenarios involved, essentially, getting to a derelict spaceship’s reactor room from the airlock. Just that. But it was so goddamned frustrating that if I hadn’t been writing about the game, I would have given up very very early on. Just picking things up and using them was a process fraught with needless clicks, accidental abandonment of the entire process, and the non-fun sort of unintended outcomes. At one point, during the inventory screen flailing involved in trying to get a drill off the floor, I took off my entire EVA suit in hard vacuum. Some things I tried to do, which seemed monumentally simple, resulted in nothing happening at all, resulting in that dreaded “I’m stuck” feeling I’d been glad to leave behind with 1990s adventure games.
NNNNNGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
I think it’s fixable. Daniel Fedor, the main fellow at Blue Bottle, is a smart bloke, and his communications with players suggest he knows exactly what’s not working with Ostranauts. What’s more, he now has the support of a publisher in the form of Modern Wolf, who seem willing and able to help him untangle things. And once Ostranauts hits early access, I know for sure it’s the sort of game whose fanbase will readily dedicate themselves to the collaborative effort of making it work better. I’m confident it’ll get there, and I’m confident it’ll be worth it, as under that screaming Frankenstein of an interface, there’s an Adonis of a space sim.
