Ostranauts

Very hardcore game that does include a ton of waiting on actions and fast forwarding time(sometimes both at the same time) , the flying is very difficult and cumbersome. play the game if you have a lot of patience but i don't.

I want to get it out of the way that I love the core concept and gameplay of Ostranauts; I love the setting, it's got great atmosphere, and the gameplay is very appealing. It's cut-throat, difficult, and does an incredible job of being hardcore noir space-sim; It's exactly what I wanted when I bought the game.

However, spoilers be damned; I have to talk about the meat. People should be aware of it before they buy the game, because like me they might make the mistake of thinking that this is a hardcoire noir-space sim grounded in reality; unfortunately, the game takes a hard left turn suddenly and becomes a supernatural meat-filled hellscape and your save becomes unplayable 20 hours in no matter what you do.

Supernatural self-replicating, sentient blobs of Meat appear and start to infest every single ship in the game after you encounter a specific derelict. Every single derelict you find after that event will be filled with this Meat, so you can't ignore it. Even if you do the associated quest chain to stop new Meat from appearing, all the Meat currently existing hangs around and keeps duplicating. And it duplicates FAST. The Meat duplicates exponentially, advancing a few tiles in every direction every time it grows -- much faster than you can kill it because your characters get exhausted very fast when fighting. Your character won't be able to kill a single tile of meat without getting exhausted and having to step back and stand still for 5 minutes to recuperate their stamina. The Meat also spreads into open space tiles, filling even space with giant blobs of Meat that you can't even reach. The Meat is impassable, and it even attacks you, dealing heavy damage.

I really get what the developer is going for narratively with the Meat; Hell, I think it's cool. But the gameplay surrounding dealing with it is so oppressive, unfun, tedious and in most cases downright impossible that it's ruined the game for me. It's even more disappointing because I LOVED the game before the Meat showed up.

UPDATE: You CAN disable the meat with console commands that the developer has linked in one of the update posts. I've done this and I'm able to enjoy the game again. I heartily recommend that you play this game, encounter the meat, get frustrated, google the debug commands to remove it, and then continue playing and having fun with a really great space game.

I love role-playing sims and I appreciate a good level of complexity in games, but something as essential as flying your ship from point A to point B shouldn't be this this hard. I guess the game is not for me if this basic feature - navigation - has to be this complex with no other way around it.

After getting used to the ui, this game went straight into my top 10 games of all time. So happy i found this

Its tough, but fun to suffer while playing. UI is hard to figure out for the first hour, but after that you get use to it.
Love that you can scavenge with or without a permit, the amount of choices are good.

Still extremely buggy, buying a second ship and ferrying off the station to the new ship will softlock the current station due to only one docking port if you haven't sold the old one in hopes of transporting things from one ship to the other.

Multiple crew will bug out when swapping between floors, sometimes not loading the selected crew member or the ship will just not be loaded in, completely defeats the point of having an entire crew when you can't even get them all on the same map to hop on the ship together.

That assumes you can actually hire crew, because people are unable to talk and do a task at the same time, and NPCs will actively walk off mid conversation because they recalled some random task they needed to do when being offered a job. You will have to chase them through multiple loading screens because they can just choose to go to a different zone.

Massive issues requiring debug workarounds, enough that teleporting between stations to fix the amount of issues you run into becomes common. NPCs don't respect station proximity with numerous reports on the reddit of them going 500m/s into docking because they don't require much slowing down and have no concern for the player among other issues.

I wish I could love the game like I did NeoScavenger, but they are talking about 1.0 release in the next year when they can't even load multiple areas at once which is likely causing half of the loading issues for multiple crew on the same station.
If you are going to force me to sit through 5-10 seconds of lag for each zone switch, you might as well just load all the areas I've switched to that have active crew, at least then you are less likely to have loading issues.

The game fails to explain the only properly implemented content is the white location diamonds, mentioned only in the patch notes as far as I can find, meaning only two locations have been implemented in the long duration so far, with the medical center in Venus Orbital still having the OKLG dialogue.
This made it nearly impossible for me to figure out if there was a second ship selling location so I could fix the starter ship occupying the main dock of the starting location.


I love the ship building, I love how detailed and alive the menus can feel with graffiti, I love how involved the wiring and reactors can be, I like that each character has a variety of needs beyond the few basic survival ones food/water/sleep. The whole game has more bite than any of the simplistic survival ship builder games out there, more personality.

All in all, I wish I could love the game, I want to build fun ships, I want to run a crew and scavenge a bunch of wrecks, I want to learn about the game and it's lore following NeoScavenger, I've come back every few months for the last four years, but every time I've run into fatal bugs, issues, game breaks that make the whole thing unplayable or breaks the pacing for all engagement I had with it.
It's a work in progress, take that as you will, but it isn't in my recommended list as of yet.

I'm 30 hours in and love everything except the mystery meat plot line.

I was enjoying the game with everything as expected, then suddenly forced to play a game in a different genre that someone else thought was cool and not what I thought I bought.

I'm sure some others will find it fun and amusing. For me it was frustrating. It ruined immersion. It wasted my time. The plot line disregarded what had been well honored player agency, taking the game a direction I didn't want, without choice. My first character and run immediately felt like it was no longer mine.

Up to that point I had been able to choose what plots to engage in and ignore others. This one's different. I didn't choose it. It appeared and forced me to make an IRL choice (because there was self-replicating meat in my airlock): slog through content that's not fun for me, or re-load a save wasting hours of my time. That choice became necessary because there wasn't a way for me to easily choose whether or not to engage with the plot without detracting from my enjoyment.

I found buried in patch notes, the commands the restrict it a bit, but that's not good enough. Having to interrupt what was otherwise fun to search out how to make it stop is not a player focused solution. More IRL time lost in which I could have been having fun.

I can't recommend the game in its current state. My advice is to wait until this genre bending plot is balanced, made optional, or (please, please, please) removed. Yes, to me, this plot line is that bad!

YMMV

Ostranauts is a hidden gem for fans of deep, immersive sim games.
From salvaging derelicts to managing your crew's quirks, every moment feels raw and personal. The gritty atmosphere and attention to detail make space survival a thrilling challenge.

If you love storytelling through gameplay and aren't afraid to work for your victories, this is a must-play.

⭐ 9/10

I like the spirit of the game, but it's definitely made for people who are probably more engineers and masochists than they are gamers. By the time you get to the nav docking screen you'll know if this game is for you or not.

If you don't want to get heavly invested into this game, like reading the manuals for how to pilot your ship or how to turn on your reactor. Then its not for you. But if your like me and think emersion and taking it slow and methodical is fun in games, then this game is for you. Yes the character creation is a little skewed, but that is mostlikely something that with get ironed out in the future i think.

This game has amazing potential. I can see it becoming a classic I revisit over and over, like Rimworld and ONI. It has somewhat similar vibes to the tragically abandoned Objects in Space. It is fun and playable in the current form, but the content is somewhat limited. I'm excited to see where it goes.

Ostranauts is an interesting and unique game that is bogged down by unintuitive game design, and disastrous technical issues. Much of the game is opaque and must be learned through videos and wiki pages. I tried Ostranauts out up until the refund time limit to see if I could put aside its flaws, but even with these external resources, all three of my attempts of even beginning to enter the gameplay loop ended in complete failure, and I felt as though I had wasted my time. The character creator is unique, but, again, very opaque. You pretty much have to know what you're doing in order to have the money, skills, and ship to make enough profit to pay off your first few shift fees, but the creator is RNG based, meaning you can't just try a "beginner's build" from the internet. In my 3-ish hours of playtime, the game crashed 4 times with no discernible similarities or triggers. I understand Ostranauts is early access, but it feels like it came out premature, and needs some love and care to become playable.

A fun space salvaging game. The setting is engaging and well developed. The story and social aspects are a bit confusing to start but interesting once you get going.
It is not yet complete but currently very playable and receiving regular updates.

while although in early access I can say that Ostra-Nauts aims for a hardcore simulator vibe similar to space station 13 mixed with rimworld. The game wont hold your hand and at first its rough, but when you start learning the mechanics it becomes highly rewarding.

Awesome! The developers included a space exploration game in their 100-hour Tetris.

It's wonky at times but I keep finding myself coming back to continue a story. In some ways, it reminds me of Duskers which has a special place in my head.

Interesting game, the derelict salvaging gameplay is nice and the ship building too. however lots of content are still in development.

For example, on one of my salvaging missions i encountered a person who was blacking out due to oxygen loss, he was in atmo suit. Tried to help him with medicine, but this mechanic is not yet implemented so i was just hitting him with syringe in the attempt to help him. He died from bleeding out, instead of suffocation.

Another problem is bugs, like the inability to finish the salvage request from the NPC, no interaction with objects until save is reloaded, or the strange bug that makes all npc in the port go to one specific terminal and do something lika a "group handshaking" while dropping all their stuff on the floor.

Still a nice game, hope they will fix bugs and add content in the future.

Absolutely excellent game. Yes, the learning curve is extreme, and you'll be googling shit all night. Yes, the bugs are legion and you'll have to get creative to get around them. By the level of game mechanics represented in even this early assess iteration of the game is outstanding. I've had moments in this game I've never had elsewhere. Like when a conduit to my nav console failed and I needed to find a creative way to fix it without the proper materials or risk smashing into something because I was already going incredible speeds. I ended up disconnecting some components just to get the power back. I hopped back into the console and continued on my way to the station with a stash worth over 100k. You just always have to be ready to puzzle solve --- figuring out how things work and building a real, practical knowledge base of the game. People in the community call it getting "hardened" because you the player are taking a very active role in things. The characters aren't the only ones that needs skills to survive: you do. And the game is a very harsh teacher. But the ability to improvise and innovate is so so fulfilling in this game. Your ship is your baby and you hate letting the borderline retarded crew ai touch it lol. 10/10 but not for everyone. It desperately needs polish --- especially the crew ai. If they were more of a help this game would truly shine. After that point, I wouldn't complain about bugs: it would just be a matter of content. Which there is plenty of at this point. The discord community is fun and very active as well. This game singlehandedly pulled me out of a depressive fugue.

I haven't gotten very far into this game, but so far it has been a wonderful experience. Can't wait to see what future updates bring.

Fantastic game. I love the complexity and the "Lone Wolf" feeling. It's been a long time since I've been so hooked on a game right from the beginning. If you like deep simulation, system complexity and fixing up old star ships, this game is for you.

at this stage i have 228 hours it is a good game well worth its price the devs actively update the game and if you are looking for a relaxing but very challenging game this is for you

I spend a significant amount of time masturbating in my ship and watching porn during LAN parties because my need for intimacy is shockingly strong. Naturally, I'm having a great time. (Try to avoid lustful traits)

The learning curve isn't as steep as folks claim and I wouldn't say the devs inhibit success right from the gate, but the sooner you embrace failure the better - experimentation is important; however, this isn't a "dying is fun" kind of game. There's no ten hours of failure before you learn how to operate an airlock.

While I can't praise the immersive UI enough, I do wish for a more QoL regarding window placement and tracking which window belongs to which container. Some elements are far larger than they should be and it gets very messy very quickly, especially with cargo pants.

I also fear for mid- and late-game depth as distant areas seem to be more of the same, but Ostranauts is a sandbox and is what you make of it. You'll almost certainly be derelict ship harvester with the occasional detective job (don't get too excited, it's very basic) and eventually save up enough money for a home and cargo ship to shuttle bulk goods from A to B. In a nutshell, that's the game. The rest lies in immersion, roleplay, and a bit of imagination.

If you can't stand buggy games, don't try this game, or EA releases in general. It is playable, but it will slowly break down. Every 1 in 10 station visits, my ship would disappear from the airlock, and the station's atmosphere would mysteriously vent into space, slowly killing all the essential NPCs inside.

But I only rate EA based on potential, and this has good potential.

Still, the game is quite unwieldy. That should be addressed right after making the game run smoother. I'm talking about the unintentionally unwieldy parts, btw.

Some of the game is intentionally unwieldy: flying your ship & managing ship systems in general. You're an unlicensed ship breaker working with nav systems and nuclear reactors (almost literally) made in China. To navigate from point to point, you need to get acquainted with a console with about 35 analog switches, mostly with brief labels like STN, BRY, BRG, & ANT, that require you to read a manual in-game to understand what each button does. It's not remotely difficult, but it is not as simple as right-click fast travel, or piloting a car in space. It may not sound like it, but it is quite fun, and could be the focus of a whole other game.

Some parts of the game are unintentionally unwieldy. For example, to designate floors for installation, you have to
(1) open your PDA
(2) open the Install app
(3) go to the Hull menu
(4) scroll until you find your floor tile (there's about 48 items in that menu, no search bar or categories)
(5) wiggle your cursor to every square you want floors installed to (there is no click-drag bounding box feature)
Did something interrupt you, or did you want to get a better look and have to close the menu? You need to repeat all that clicking to get the floor again.

To order a crew member to uninstall a wall-lamp, you have to:
(1) open your PDA
(2) open the Orders app
(3) untick the five other categories, only leaving POWER on, otherwise you might uninstall the floor on the same tile as the wall lamp
(4) click uninstall
(5) find the wall lamp in the world again, and left click it

As you can see, unwieldy.

IMO first priority should be to
(1) make saving and loading much much faster
(2) make loading from the menu possible
this is so we can quickly test the game and write quality bug reports, since the devs said that they are in the "hardening" phase of development

"Death, Taxes, and Probably Another Hull Breach"

OMG! I am old and have played many, many games. I have read many, many Science Fiction books. This is it. Climb past the wonky UI. You are a belter out in the expanse, crossing the gap, living on a downbelow station. If you have read this far buy it. It is fantastic!

A good game. The learning curve isn't as big as it seems at first for actual game play. It is is a very detailed, "living in corporate dystopian space". With a bit of cthulhu mixed in.

This game came out of nowhere for me and scratched an itch I had for a long time for a space game. Cannot wait to see where it goes

The game is fun and interesting but it needs more work done before i'd actually recommend it. go for it if this sort of thing is your bag, baby. otherwise wait for it to make some more progress in its early access

I really really wish I could recommend this game. Underneath all of the bugs, there is an absolutely terrific game. However, the bugs will break your saves. You will lose an hour to several of your play time. It will be frustrating as hell. And it will happen over and over. Sure, patches keep going out. But the game just isn't reliable enough yet. You shouldn't be able to ruin your saves and lose progress due to bugs in a game.

I really enjoy scavenging things and building up the player ship.
Lot's of fun, suspense, and joy.
If its this good while still in dev, then the final product will be amazing!

While I was playing, the game got updated and broke my save, however a previous quicksave was available.

Other than that, it's so far pretty good. The learning curve isn't that bad as of yet, I mean you get can learn to get from point A to point B pretty quickly, then the rest you'll have time to experiment with.

Also, the UI could be improved to just be a bit more user-friendly but apart from those it's a nice game and seems interesting.

I wish there were a sideways thumb for this one.

If you really like the idea of space survival, exploration, trading, etc. this is (on paper) a really awesome gem of a game. Sincerely. The interface is rough but serviceable once you learn the game. Some of the mini games lke docking and exploration are IMO a lot of fun.

However, I think i've found the first game in my life that the graphics were too low fidelity to enjoy the game. I still actively play games from an Atari 800 computer (1979) and Commodore Amiga (1985), but my eyes genuinely have no idea what's on screen when I'm walking around stations or other ships. It's a little extra jarring because some things (the player sprite, and menus / docking / 'books', etc) are significantly smoother and higher quality - so the asthetic change to the main game itself feels very off.

The only thing I can think is that I raised the filter setting in graphics to maximum and maybe it made things worse.. but on my PC the game looked significantly worse than Rimworld which made it too hard to distinguish thingso n screen.

I wish the devs well on this game - it's definitely got a lot good going for it, especially heart and soul.

I've played this for about a hundred hours and I've had a lot of fun. I got my moneys worth out of it. That being said I probably wouldn't recommend buying it in current state. I have a few problems with it at the state it's in.

One, a lot of bugs. Loading/unloading large ships with multiple crewmembers breaks sometimes. I take the tram on one crewmember to level 2 of the station, do my stuff, take the tram back, my ship is no longer docked, my character has not traveled back to level 1, and the game is softlocked. Or the room bug where sometimes, randomly, your ship will just depressurize and fail to hold pressure until you uninstall and reinstall a wall in your ship. Or when the police won't interact with me after they force dock to inspect my ship, I undock, and they declare me resisting arrest. The bugs make what's a really good framework just unplayable.

Two, building a ship is tedious. The game progression of this is that you get handed a dumpster of a ship and a pile of debt, and you go scrapping to spruce your ship up with salvaged parts and sell your stuff. Eventually you get a large enough ship, build a reactor, and go travel the solar system since your reactor can propell you to everywhere else. I never got beyond the starting asteroid (to be fair you don't NEED to) to go explore Venus (the next main area) because of the bugs and the fact that making my ship the way I wanted it to be making felt like a job. I could just be a perfectionist but I just kind of dropped the game because it felt like work getting my ship to be the way I wanted it to be.

The AI is not good, you need to babysit your crew or they might do stupid things. Leaving my game at FFW for 30, real life minutes while my guy goes and replaces floor tiles, punctuated every 10 minutes by me babysitting him taking off his suit, putting him on the toilet, taking a drink from a water bottle, and then putting the suit back on, is just bad gameplay and tedious. If you don't do this, your guy could starve, suffocate, or decompress himself or the ship.

Fantastic space scavenger game, none other like it. Can't wait for future updates.

its fire but its complicated and can be buggy at times

On paper, this kind of crunchy space scavenger game is exactly what i want.
In practice, you end up spending more time with the god awful UI design than you do actually making any progress.
When you do figure out anything, you realize how much effort it takes to do even the most basic actions.
Definitely not for me, and I have hundreds of hours in CDDA.

The menus are awful, the interface is cluttered, and the tutorials are a joke.
Even just trying to look around and SEE whats in a ship is painful. Is that tiny sprite storage? Is it worth anything? Did you just target a person? Here's 100 status effects they have good luck parsing out useful information in this cluttered hell.

Theres just too much going and not enough game going on, I don't feel the fun, what I do feel is a deep disconnection from reality as I try to understand this UI. This game should be taken as a lesson on what NOT to do in your crunchy space game.

So much annoying bugs it almost made me play the game like roguelike. Well, half joking, half the truth. I had given up at least 2 weakling newbie saves because of tutorial quest bug. Then finally made my latest char return from the 1st dangerous space trip after 45 hours spent in game. I just bought the game for 5 days. And this is just the beginning.
Normally I would leave -ve rating for so much stupid bugs/ glitches then go and forget about it......I just can't hate this detailed loved good game. There's not much outerspace management sim rpg out there which are similar to this nowadays. Sure the learning curve is unforgiving, but once you started to pick up (by googling everything, lol) it's fun and you know more's waiting ahead.

I like the game aesthetic very much. Beautiful.

Would like to see the dev good and happy. Support and buy. Make Ostranauts great.

P.S. I loved Neo Scavangers and was very skeptical about this game's bad rating on steam. Turn out that I'm not regret buying. Wish I could have bought it sooner actually.

I think this game still has some glitches in it especially if you try to chain orders together. It seems like it just gets stuck. As long as you do one job at a time it's fine. Overall I really do like the game. Make sure you read the Manual though, Its really helpful. Overall It's still a 7/10

Great game for a good price.
I like story driven character creation, and open world.
You can salvage ships legally, or not. Build/expand your own ship, or steal someone else's.

Space loot goblin simulator, it's very difficult at first but once you overcome the trials, it becomes very enjoyable to play.

10/10 Awesome space Hardcore Survival. Ship upgrading, fixing and simulation is great. A lot of depth and content. way more to come. I highly Recommend.

If you enjoy any of the following:

- Long and lonely hours alone in a spaceship with only your shoddy handiwork between you and the deadly vacuum of space
- Suffocating because you didn't install an oxygen pump correctly
- Suffering from insomnia and muscle atrophy
- Consuming food containing severed parts of an elder god ethically sourced infinite protein

This game is for you

The game is a little daunting to get into, (Including some visual clarity issues), but once it clicked, I had an amazing amount of fun scavenging derelicts for parts so I could build a cool little ship. There was nothing more satisfying than stripping down a hulk in its entirety, then pulling back into the dock to sell all my loot. Also my character dated a cool butch woman so if you want to live out your grungy lesbian spacer fantasies it's pretty great. It'd be cool if different body types were added in the future. I want to be a tiny grease monkey with an attitude. Anyway, game is fun. Highly recommend.

Honestly, Ostranauts is brutal.

The game kinda throw you out there, ridden with debt, absolutely no idea what anything in (or generally related to) your character creation process even meant and barely any idea on how to do, well, most things, really.

But, as soon as you get past the "Who am I and why am I here?" stage of the game and get into the process of learning how the game works, it truely becomes a great experience.

Just a short warning: Everything takes time (a lot of time in this particular case) and this really is more of a slow and methodical game with quite a bit of trial and error (mostly error) and so may require some patience (as in literal hours worth of patience) and frustration tolerence (looking at you, micro-astroids).

Also note that 23 hours is still far from end-game, though to fair here I am rather slow in making progress

Anyway, I hope you like context menus, because you will be seeing a lot of them

So far, from the little I've seen, I foresaw tones of engaging depths but unintuitiveness, inaccessibility, and clunkiness at its core.
And I don't think time alone can fix this, give or take.

My dream game is a game where you basically play in something like the Firefly universe...just you, your crew, and your ship doing whatever you can to survive. There are a lot of space sims but they often fall short in some way.

Ostranauts isn't quite there but it does scratch the itch in a great way. You basically get to make your way around a near future version of the solar system, trying to make a living. They've got this Traveler-like character development piece at the beginning which affects your skills, what you start with, etc. then you're off into the solar system with what amounts to a flying coffin (unless you're lucky) and a basic suit to protect you from space. You're in a big ship graveyard where you get to salvage and scavenge but you can actually restore ships as well. Need a bigger ship? Go find one and restore it (which takes a lot of time).

There are basic NPCs with a whole plot system that gives you random missions and tasks to take on if you want something more to do, plus there are some gigs you can grab off a terminal. The game also tries to simulate various things to give you a bit more of a hardcore flavor. You can't just close a ship's hull and fly off. You need to keep temperatures stable. You need a minimum amount of O2. With a recent update, reactors went from being simple to being complex especially if you want to get across the solar system.

In the end, it's a fun game. The developer got a new publisher so updates have been coming through much faster than they used to and they're headed for 1.0 and hopefully beyond. If you've played BBG's previous game (NeoScavenger), you'll be very familiar with the game. If not, there's a tutorial that walks you through the initial basics but you'll learn real quick that the game can be unforgiving so be prepared.

You can build ships within the "map" you're in however you want so there's a lot of flexibility there.

It is great now, but it will be amazing when ship to ship combat is implemented

This game is immensely confusing and I have no idea what happened. I got a arrested a few times before realizing I was breaking the law, and then refunded the game. Banger game but I am going to wait for more YouTube tutorials or something to come out because it's REALLY confusing

Really fun life/sim set in space. Updates pretty regularly, excited when this hits 1.0 release

Came across this game from a you-tuber playing it and it looked interesting. Really would recommend, it's pretty hardcore the level of detail the developers go even if you have your shoes on the wrong feet it affects you. Well after being spaced, running out of 02, crashing into the station, getting shived by pirates or my ship failing apart. i think i am on 87th version of my character now. If you like Rimworld, you'll love this just watch some youtube vids on it's first as it has a mountain of a learning curve but well worth it.