StarRupture has been a B-list wish list item for a few weeks now, and thanks to a 15% discount from IndieGala it’s moved off the wish list and onto my hard drive.

This probably won’t be a long post, in part because I’ve only completed “the tutorial” which drove me directly to start a new game to remedy the corners I had painted myself into during said tutorial, and because I can sum up the game in just one word: Satisfactory.

As much as I hate to use a game to describe a game, the games industry has eagerly allowed me to do so. Like Satisfactory, StarRupture is about being deposited on another world by a corporation. Players are guided by a cheerful AI ancestor of GLaDOS who explains how to do things, and how much the Corporation values our character’s indentured servitude. Here, though, we are a criminals working off our sentences on what had once been an attempted colony world, but is now suspiciously devoid of previous colonists and abandoned for reasons that I’m sure we’ll find out.

The purpose of the game is automation. First order of business is to create a habitation module with some consoles. Then we need to create the orbital launcher that will eject the fruits of our labors into space for the Corporation’s benefit. We do this by adding solar panels around the launcher, and then connecting the launcher to a smelter, which is in turn connected to an ore harvester. Each of these are linked by aerial belts which move the ore to the smelter, and the refined goods to the launcher. If you’ve played Satisfactory than you know that this is merely the start of the operation. Eventually, fabricators get put into the mix, and players will need to balance their ore harvester output with different fabricators, splitting and merging output and inputs, and finding the space to make it all happen.

StarRupture does a few interesting things, though. Rather than work for one company, players can decide which company to support. There are currently five Corporations, and sending goods to them via the launcher earns points for that company. After so many points, a progressive tier is unlocked. Each company provides different items at tier 1, like a pistol, personal storage, fabricators, respawn points, or recipe kiosks. By building multiple launchers and setting up multiple ore harvesters and smelters, players can earn points for multiple companies at the same time. In addition, there’s the hand mining tool which is generally used to collect resources used in creating building blocks necessary for construction, but other discoveries can be turned into raw points which can be used to goose the points total for any corporation at any time.

There are enemies that can be encountered early on, small four-legged insect-slash-lizard things that can be killed using the hand mining cannon. There are also a few points of interest visible on the horizon, such as area scanners which can write information to a map tablet (which needs to be unlocked at the corporate terminal). Far in the distance, one can see the remains of the previous colonization attempts, so not only do I expect there to be more difficult and larger creatures to avoid and/or slaughter, but I suspect there’s history to uncover.

Speaking of which, there is a story in StarRupture. Up to four people can play and each person can choose one of four prisoners. When playing alone, one character can be chosen initially, but by using the respawn capsule, a solo player can switch between any of the four characters though I don’t actually know why that’s relevant as I’ve not seen any stats that differentiate one character from another. There are also voice lines throughout the game, like it or not — I do not like them — which not only includes our character talking to the AI when relevant, but also features chatter between the character’s themselves via a kind of “psychic communicator” that allows the characters in stasis to get some mental exercise while while sidelined. I suppose it’s meant to provide a bonding story for the characters, but the lines aren’t all that interesting and neither are the characterizations. Making matters worse, our character likes to repeat some wild lines on occasion, like picking up plants or fruit or other items. I turned off the voice volume but left the subtitles, just in case there’s something important I need to know.

I liked Satisfactory just fine, although I find it stressful; I don’t like to repeat myself and the only thing I actually like refactoring is code. I’d often find myself stymied by my placement of machines in Satisfactory, and I know that such a trial is a key component of StarRupture as well. Removing built items provides a full refund, but every build is part of a network, meaning relocating one node probably requires relocating more than one node…probably several if not all. Doing it and then having to redo it to make room for something I didn’t know I needed later on, or just to re-work my space isn’t something I really enjoy, which is probably why I’m not still playing Satisfactory. We’ll see how StarRupture fares in that regard.