Edge of Space

I wanted to like Edge of Space more than the numbers suggest I should. There is something genuinely weird and appealing about its alien world, Achoa, a place where the color palette runs psychedelic and the creature design swings from absurdist comedy to legitimately unsettling. Floating continents, wormhole anomalies, randomly generated caverns that pull you deeper the longer you dig. The bones of a small-studio love letter to the 2D sandbox genre are absolutely here, and for a two-person team at Handyman Studios, the ambition is real. The closest obvious reference point is Terraria, though Edge of Space takes a narrower approach: one planet, one world, dug deep rather than spread wide. You start with a laser pick and your wits, gather resources, and craft your way up through a tiered progression that covers armor, weapons, base facilities, vehicles ranging from hoverboards to mechs, and even collectible pets that grant combat or exploration perks. The Command Center system lets you customize a headquarters with defensive turrets, repair drones, and a PIOS (Power Input Output Systems) drag-and-drop electrical grid that can go from powering a light to building logic gates, depending on how deep you want to go. The creature roster is legitimately funny: Artillabears, squid pandas, DJ Penguin as a boss. That tonal absurdism is a deliberate choice, and if you are the kind of player who laughed at every Red Dwarf episode, it will land. Here is where honesty matters, though. The Steam reception sits firmly in mostly-negative territory, and the reasons are layered. A significant chunk of that negativity traces back to a rough Early Access period with character wipes, bugs, and a launch that felt underbaked to many players who met the 1.0 tag with skepticism. The tutorial has consistently been criticized for under-explaining core systems, particularly the fabricator placement rules that quietly gate your crafting progress. Controls have a learning curve that is less elegant and more abrupt. The early game, before you hit a critical mass of gear, punishes curiosity more than it rewards it, and the radar-and-beacon navigation system, while conceptually interesting, adds friction where a minimap would serve better. The harder truth, and one worth sitting with before you click anything, is that Handyman Studios has gone dark. The developer confirmed the project was shelved after publisher support dried up, with patch v1.09 from late 2016 being the final notable update. The multiplayer co-op mode, clearly the intended heart of the experience, is functionally a ghost town at this point. Solo play is possible and the world is pleasant to poke around in for a few hours, but the game was designed around friends, and that context is largely gone. What you are buying is a finished-ish artifact of a small studio that ran out of runway. For the right person, there is still something worth an afternoon here: a curiosity piece from the mid-2010s indie sandbox wave, strange and unpolished and strangely sincere. The world of Achoa has a handmade quality that big-budget survival games rarely bother with. But go in clear-eyed. The community is quiet, the bugs from launch were never fully ironed out, and the co-op that would have made this shine is not a realistic option anymore.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Edge of Space.