Space Order Mine

If you like minesweeper, but feel like it needs more upgrades and spaceship combat, this game is for you!

I want to like this game. The idea is solid. It's Backpack Heroes plus Minesweeper. That's like chocolate plus peanut butter. It's just not a polished product. The item descriptions use English words but they're so cryptic they might as well not be in Latin. The game makes no effort to explain what many effects do. There is no way to see your load out except when adding to it. And a dozen other tiny things that would bring me back. Instead I'll just go play Backpack Heroes or Minesweeper.

According to the forums, no new features are planned. That's disappointing because this game is just short of being great, and it sucks to see something that's 95% of the way there basically abandoned because Steam fails to promote smaller games properly. I don't blame devs for not investing in a product that's effectively hidden to all but a small subset of users, it's just how this platform is. I just can't really say this is what people are expecting for the price. The inventory management is well done and seems balanced enough, but ultimately what kills it is the lack of start variety. Your ship is always a simple square shape, and you always start with the same items. This makes new runs very tedious to start, undermining replay value. Since this is structured like a meta-based rather than skill-based roguelite, it suffers further from a lack of metaprogression, deepening the feeling that every run is going to feel the same as all the others. Item and mechanic variety seems adequate but the previous factors make it a moot point because I don't have a third run in me.

The game lacks a bit of polish here and there, has very little content/variety, and the pace of a run is quite slow, but if you can handle that, this is a pretty good turn based minesweeper/inventory roguelike with a similar vibe to FTL. Not very challenging.

No meta-progression: which I knew going in but I'm disclosing it would be better with it. Got the ending in 3.2 hours - single playthrough. One-shot. There are some parts combinations that just make the game downright trivial - which is EXACTLY what we want in a game like this. The minesweeper element keeps the triviality from being too...trivial. So that's new, and I like it. You can't turn off your brain and left-click or what-have-you because the game will punish you for failures in the minesweeper element - which is nowhere near as difficult as, say, Microsoft's Minesweeper.

Quick, but fun game. Dust of those minesweeper skills and put 'em to use. Straight-forward gameplay, but lots of room for inventiveness and customization. Beat in in 6 hours on 2nd attempt.