Objects in Space

I came to Objects in Space expecting something in the neighbourhood of Elite Dangerous with a retro skin, and what I got instead was closer to running a Cold War submarine through a dystopian 80s that never quite existed. The aesthetic is called Modempunk, and that label does real work: green-tinted terminal screens, blinking cursors for incoming messages, no cockpit window to speak of. Your ship has no windshield. You know asteroids are hitting the hull because the radar says so and you hear the clank. If that description sounds like misery to you, close this tab now. If it sounds like the most interesting thing you have read today, keep reading. The core loop is built around the Apollo cluster of star systems, a hand-crafted open world split between 12 populated systems and 20 uncharted ones. You take contracts from over fifty employers, hauling cargo, ferrying passengers, and occasionally accepting bounty work, and your reputation with each employer rises or falls based on whether you deliver. The tension comes from the same place it comes from in the best strategy games: resource management under uncertainty. Do you answer the SOS from the ship on your scanner, or do you keep to your deadline and protect the reputation score you spent hours building? Every decision has a numeric consequence, and the game is honest about that math in a way I respect. Ship customisation goes deep enough that picking the wrong battery brand genuinely matters. The component ecosystem, including brands like Ventarii and Xiao Sa, each with different trade-offs, is exactly the kind of build-decision layer that keeps strategy players theorycrafting between sessions. Combat, when you choose to engage it, runs on stealth logic rather than reflex. You run silent, cut power to your systems, and float on your current trajectory hoping enemy scanners miss you. Combat scenarios, including Defence, Convoy Attack, Escape, and Survival modes, are available as discrete challenge content for players who want to stress-test their piloting skills outside of the main open world. Multiplayer scenarios let up to four players cooperate or compete over LAN, which is a legitimate co-op hook that most write-ups undersell. There is also a pure sandbox mode that strips the narrative out entirely, good for players who want to optimise trade routes without story interruptions. Here is the honest part of this review: the game is abandoned. Flat Earth Games, a team of two people at its core, confirmed they moved on after launch and the updates dried up. Steam user sentiment sits at mixed, around 51 percent positive. The Mac version has compatibility issues with modern macOS. A community wiki exists and a player-made Infopedia PDF helps newcomers, but there is no patch pipeline to fix what remains rough. The tutorial does a reasonable job contextualising ship systems as you encounter them, and the in-game Infopedia covers every component, but the acronym soup on the cockpit HUD is genuinely confusing for the first few hours. Patience is not optional here, it is a mechanical prerequisite. For the right player, specifically someone who would colour-code a trade route spreadsheet and considers Silent Hunter a comfort game, Objects in Space delivers a flavour of space sim that almost nothing else attempts. The short-story structure, where handcrafted characters appear across dozens of vignettes rather than one linear main quest, punches well above the budget. Just go in knowing the devs have moved on and the game you are buying is the game that exists, no more updates coming.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Objects in Space.