Space noir roguelike Ostranauts is aiming for 1.0 in 2025, with help from Kitfox as publisher
Die in space with better QoL
Post-apocalyptic roguelike Neo Scavenger is one of my favourite games, but its spacefaring followup Ostranauts, currently in Early Access, is currently too fiddly and complicated for me. Here's some good news, then: Kitfox, masters of making impenetrable roguelikes more welcoming, have joined the project as publisher ahead of a planned 1.0 release in 2025.
Ostranauts is a "hardcore noir space-sim", in which you scavenge shipwrecks in order to expand and customise your own ship. Every system onboard your vessel can be interacted with via its own panel of buttons and displays, and it's all but inevitable that you will die due to your own incompetence or carelessness. The only hope is that the death is interesting.
I badly want to create a captain, hire a crew, build a ship, and go die in space, but as soon as I see a UI with 18 buttons on it, and have no immediate idea what they do, I'm out. Even if, beyond those quality-of-life issues, Nate had plenty of kind words for Ostranauts around its initial launch.
Hopefully Kitfox can help. They're the publisher behind the recent Steam release of Dwarf Fortress, who helped take that game from ASCII art and obtuse keyboard controls to something much friendlier, without compromising the spirit or depth of the simulation. They're also currently working on the 1.0 release of Caves Of Qud, due later this year, which is a similarly inscrutable roguelike that has been in development for fifteen years.
Or maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part. Ostranauts is already more visual and legible than both Dwarf Fortress and Caves Of Qud, and there's no specific mention of work to make the game graspable in the announcement of the partnership with Kitfox.
In any case, I'm looking forward to giving Ostranauts another go with its full release. Neo Scavenger is truly brilliant: a roguelike set in a handcrafted world where you're as likely to die from eating the wrong mushrooms as from a hard-scrabble fist fight with an alien. It has the best combat of any game released in 2014.