When I managed to click around until I could find a star I could move to, I tried to harvest resources to keep playing, only to have the resource menu simply vanish, and leave me stranded in a solar system of layered, displaced graphics, which ended that particular run. Accidentally hitting ‘continue’ from the menu stuck me in a frozen screen that prompted a dialogue box that can through what seemed like a standard interactive tutorial, except there was nothing to interact with, and once I clicked through to the end I couldn’t leave the screen or remove the now-empty dialogue box.ĭuring a random event that read like it was supposed to throw me to a random position on the star map my ship became frozen in place, breaking the camera and distance display. They refer to ‘tapping’ instead of ‘clicking’ or ‘selecting’. The in-game hints still read like a mobile game. So the Omega Edition, a Steam release, seemed like it could be nice.Īnd it is nice. There’s no real action, so being interrupted while playing on a bus or something isn’t a huge deal, but still, I wanted to be able to play it from the comfort of my chair, whenever I felt like. It was a choose your own adventure rogue-like when it launched on mobile, and almost from the start I remember wishing it had a PC release of some kind. It has a simple science fiction setup and then throws you into the deep end of the pool, and you will likely drown. As long as you ask me no follow-up questions? Yes. You can write them down, if you want, and eventually you could manually translate every alien word yourself. There’s an entire alien language which you come across in random events, and sometimes you get translations for specific words, and when you die you lose those translations. There are derelict alien ships you can sometimes find. There’s a dozen or more technologies that you can obtain and build, but you need to re-obtain them every time you play. There are multiple endings, and I have no idea what they are because I’ve never made it to them. You need to visit planets and stars to mine minerals and harvest fuel, and sometimes doing that can kill you. If you run out of fuel or oxygen, you die. I had been picturing a less combat focused FTL, and instead what I got was a brutal survival simulator, one that despite being surprisingly simple to wrap my head around wound up being one of the most difficult games I’ve ever played. What I got, though, was not what I was expecting. Since these sort of games are kind of my jam, I went out of my way to pick it up for iOS as soon as humanly possible. When Out There was announced for mobile platforms back in 2013 it seemed like it had the chance to become another of the growing list of indie space games that, for the most part, have done an excellent job at capturing the dangers of science fiction space travel and space combat.
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