Rodina

Development is at a snails pace and Im convinced its just so steam doesnt hit it with the "No update in a while" warning. There is literally no reason why this games updates are so slow and minimal. The flying is cool but there is nothing to do but that. Combat sucks.

Yet another "Early Access" abandonware.

This is a game with heart being built by a passionate developer (one person). Please try the demo and share it around, it needs more recognition and a push to get even more added. The game is "incomplete" but offers a wholly unique experience over larger-scale games like Elite, X4 or No Man's Sky. Scale comes through like nothing else I've played, ship customisability is wonderful, the flight model is satisfying and exploration is rewarding. The game is beautifully rough around in the edges in the sense that it is made by an old-school programmer, not a graphical artist aiming for spectacle: in essence, the games mentioned before look prettier, but this one feels better and doesn't have any unnecessary frills.

An an absolute peak immersive, open world, minimalist, exploration, survival. Delicious ambient background soundtrack, wide open skies, depth and poise. A novel of game, deep and rich.

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…