Recent reviews by SunsetIndustries

Caveat Emptor: This is a game with a lot of potential, but also a game that shouldn't have been released for sale until it was further along.

I've played hundreds of hours of NeoScavenger (a game by the same dev) and it's become one of my favorite games of all time. I think with enough time Ostranauts will get there. This game really has no gameplay as of right now, you can dock with a space station but character creation is very limited and I've yet to see any... well... actual story.

This is one of the major risks of paying for an early access game, and I fear this may be one of those games I forget about for five years until it's actually done and then get a chance to get into. So if you want to support the development of a really neat game, go for it!

But if you want something you can actually play right now and have fun with... I'd wait a little while. $20 is a bit steep for what it is.

I've been enjoying the hell out of this game, I can only describe it as FTL meets WH40K-esque lore.

• The art is amazing. The pixel art on this game shines, especially the bosses and the cutscenes. I'm an artist but I can't do crap when it comes to pixel art, I always admire people that can convey so much with so little and they seriously went all out with the art in the game.
  
  
• Random Encounters! Mindworms! Actual giant sandworms! Death cults! Evil scrappers! Civil wars! People that just want to be left alone to do their weird research! All of these and more are found randomly throughout the game; if you're in a 50/50 challenge you can redo these as they repeat through playthroughs and get different results.
  
  
• Special officers! I really like that you collect these special officers as you play, but you can't just stick with the same ones because of a time-delay system where they're being "regrown" in a cloning vat. This forces you to build different teams and try different tactics each playthrough.
  
  
• The story is great! I've spent a lot of time on FTL (I own it on GOG, here, god only knows how many actual hours I've spent on it at this point) but one of the things I always wished FTL had was more story. This game scratches that narrative itch in a big way! There are some super interesting things about the lore I'd love to get into but I don't want to spoil it for anybody so I'll leave it out.

• No rewind button Often in dialogues your finger might slip on the left mouse button or the space bar and you can lose huge chunks of dialogue by accident. If I could use the mouse wheel to rewind that back it would be awesome!
  
  
• Some encounters do get repetitive After you've died a ton (and you will die a ton!) you'll start seeing some missions recycle, ones where you know that you're not going to have a good result so you end up skipping through them because you want to conserve your scrap. Which is a shame, but no game's perfect.

Overall though, it's a great game! I hope they keep updating it because I'm eventually going to finish it on all the difficult levels and I don't want to find another new favorite game haha. If you enjoy FTL-like games, love space emperor warhammer 40k type stuff, you should definitely give this one a try.