Rodina

At least let your customer's know you've stopped working on the game.

EA Abandonware

Close to 13 years we've waited for "Daggerfall in space" with no content updates since 2023 (which were few and far between anyway)

A single-dev experimental at-scale space exploration, narrative and combat game which immediately throws me back to the first time around high school I discovered the existence of a DOS game called Noctis IV. If you're desperate for a game where you marvel at the orders of magnitude in cosmic travel scale (and occasionally shoot things) and engage with seamless ground to warp, it's a cozy little time. Caveat emptor: the dev's not doing it for money or for deadlines, and often goes months without a changelog or update announcement. It's best to treat this as a thing which exists and not become too emotionally invested in its potential. That said, it does have mod support!

I first discovered this game around 2015 after NerdCubed did his video on it, and I've never really put it down since. It was the first game installed on my new gaming laptop, and because it takes up so little disc space I keep it installed all the time so I can boot it up whenever. Rodina is my favourite space game, and one of my favourite games ever. Despite it's tiny disc size, and small scope compared to most other space games (one solar system vs a whole galaxy like No Man's Sky), Rodina feels the biggest. You land on a planet at what looks like a reasonably close to to your location, and realise you've got a much longer walk ahead of you than you realised. The player character doesn't move slowly either! I think Rodina feels so much bigger because it excels at making you feel small. The planets are planet sized, and they orbit the star in real time. You can land and watch the sun set, then take off and fly around the world to watch it rise. Asteroids spin much faster and so you can see the night sky constantly rotating around you. I love leaving my ship flying away from a planet, walking into my observation bay (I always build one) and watching the planet get smaller and sma…

While development isn't exactly the fastest, I have definitely gotten my money's worth from this game. It scratches an itch that few games ever have in the genre of sci-fi.