IKO 39

I want to root for IKO 39. The premise alone carries a quiet, eerie gravity: you are engineer Casey, dropped onto the colonial planet Morrow after the station there goes dark, your ship already damaged on arrival, Earth completely out of reach. Your only company is an AI named EMI, whispering guidance through the static. That setup has real loneliness baked into it, and in its better moments the game uses the isolation well. What you actually do on Morrow is a third-person mix of investigation and light combat. You gather tools progressively: a blaster for the hostile robots that patrol the station grounds, a jetpack for reaching the larger open-world geometry, an electrical attack, and eventually a drone that opens up a puzzle mission in the caves. The gadget progression feels satisfying on paper, and the environments have a scale that surprises you for a small independent project. There are moments where the alien landscape stretches out and something genuinely cinematic flickers into view. That flicker, though, is the honest word for it. The game spent three years in development before its early-access launch in August 2022, and the seams of that long, difficult road show clearly in the final product. The technical problems are the real story here. Community feedback documented broken door geometry that physically blocks progress, a camera shake triggered by enemy explosions that only clears on a full restart, autosave corruption when a cutscene and a death coincide, and a Steam VR plugin that would hijack the launcher and freeze the whole application despite this being a non-VR title entirely. Patches addressed several of these issues after release, including disabling the VR plugin and rewriting parts of the save system, but the overall review picture on Steam sits at a mixed split. The voice acting, where present, has been noted as strained and uneven, pulling you out of the atmosphere the environment works hard to build. The audience for IKO 39 in its current state is narrow: patient players with a tolerance for rough solo-dev work who are drawn to the specific flavour of stranded-on-an-alien-world mystery, and who are comfortable with the possibility of a progression-blocking bug requiring a save reload or a fresh start. If you bounced off bigger-budget space survival games because they felt too polished and corporate, there is something here that is genuinely handmade and strange. The scale of the world, the gadget toolkit, and the AI companion thread deserve a more stable foundation than they currently rest on.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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