Out There is a brutal space adventure game where you are an astronaut in a spaceship and you need to go at the bottom right of the map. To do so, you spend fuel, oxygen, break your spaceship instruments, find alien planets, make decisions, spend fuel, salvage something for precious iron, spend fuel, then drift endlessly in space. I enjoyed it, even if I couldn’t make it very far.
I’m looking at the stats you get at the end of the game, something about destroying stars and terraforming planets… I never got there. I always lost by running out of fuel - even with my best attempts at mining for more. The game should have an easy mode. Or some tips at judiciously chosen places. It’s kind of a roguelike, and the game is stacked against you in some ways, but I felt it got borderline on ‘unfair’ and ‘frustrating’ levels at some points. I have nothing against my stuff breaking randomly or making the wrong decision and having some consequences, all I want is some fairness in a few core concepts.
Moving around the galaxy is one of these, it happened so many times that I lost because I ran out of fuel, trying to get to stars that were barely PIXELS away from the range of my space folder. I’m not sure if the paths are randomly generated or fixed, but it sure would be nice to see a vague outline of where you could go from each star in the galaxy. Maybe there’s an upgrade that allows for increased radius of interplanetary travel, but I hadn’t found it. Speaking of upgrades, you collect them through the game and you need specific metals to build them. But they’re lost when you start a new game. I wish they would stay, I wish I’d keep the knowledge of all these advanced things I could build the second time around. I don’t feel like it would break the gameplay so much because you wouldn’t have the materials to build them right away. And you keep words of alien languages here and there, so it wouldn’t be too silly to keep unlocked upgrades too.
You can find new ships by finding them and boarding them, giving you access to their technologies and allowing you to transfer your materials with you. You can use them to replenish your fuel, oxygen and hull capacity or to repair and build your ship systems. Things like a drill to mine for ores or a telescope to see further in the galaxy. If an important system - like the one that allows you to warp - breaks and you’re out of materials, you have to salvage others to make due. Everything is well explained and balanced out. Although I’ll reiterate that I never died because I lacked air or that my hull was cracked up, it was always a fuel problem, that’s weird.
I liked Out There, even if I couldn’t get very far and the idea of starting over from scratch got unappealing after a few tries. Space looked vast and full of story twists and other technologies and actions you could take, but alas, I can only that I could’ve seen what was… out there!