

It’s both disheartening and motivating, though. In my entire year (if not more) with the game, I have never reached the end, and there are three alternative endings. On the flip side, the replay value is enormous since the procedurally generated star maps are always different, so you never have the same walkthrough twice. Occasionally, this punishing, painful, agonizingly unforgiving cruelty of the gameplay may get on your nerves.

On some occasions, a warp “out there” will send you to a star system that is too far away from other stars, except for a Supernova, and you meet your dead end being unable to move anywhere but the bursting star, or die adrift. Needless to say, you will be dying way too often from reasons as dull as lack of oxygen or fuel. The lifelike randomness of the entire experience is horrifying, to say in the least. Step by step you will learn that language, and try to untangle the back story that explains the entire sinister agenda behind your journey.īesides aliens, you will witness entire civilizations go extinct in space wars or planetary cataclysms, giant and tiny parasites trying to feed on you or your spaceship – well, tons of things actually. On other occasions, you will meet intelligent life forms and they will speak a language you don’t understand. You can come across the remnants of these every once in a while in Out There, and your best option is if you find some gizmo or learn a new technology that may help you expand your ship and fly faster or further. I was afraid of that, but there they are – ancient intelligent civilizations lying in ruins, extinct. We are not unique, and we have no destiny other than the one we make for ourselves.” And yet I now know that intelligent life is recurrent in the universe. The nameless astronaut even elaborates on the perks of being a sentient organism – “ Back on our poor old rock, Earth, we imagined that intelligent life was a divine scheme… that we were unique… that we had a destiny. So much more.īesides the supplies, you will come across other elements, which can be used to craft the technologies you learn, and you learn new technologies from the alien races you come across in the vast and endless universe. As a result, the majority of the gameplay is a thoughtful resource management, but there is more to it. Your ship is rather functional in a way that it can probe and mine for resources, but it’s also limited because it only has a set amount of slots to store the elements you mine and the technologies you build. You fly from star to star, exploring the planets nearby to replenish your meager stock of the said fuel, oxygen and metal supplies. From here, your journey begins every time you start from scratch – the same ship, the same stock, the same entry point.

You play as an astronaut on a mission gone terribly wrong, and you wake up from stasis in an unknown sector of the universe with a very limited stock of fuel, oxygen and metal to repair the hull.

Out There is a lonesome, desperate attempt to survive alone and lost in space. In terms of gameplay mechanics, little has changed, but let me throw in a brief overview for those who haven’t played it before.
