![]() ![]() There are no real quests or goals (except one, more on that in a second) so you spend your time just trying to find resources to make cool stuff like armor. You can turn dirt into packed dirt or sand into glass or ore into ingots. Like its spiritual predecessors Minecraft and Terraria, Starbound allows players to dig for resources and craft a huge amount of items. 16-bit style graphics are the name of the game, but Starbound is about depth. If you're the type of gamer who can't wait for a new open-world RPG so you can explore every corner of the map on foot, then Starbound is for you. And although I love the game I discovered that the more I played the more I wondered what the hell was going on. Hygiene took a backseat to a day full of exploration and crafting and getting to know the ins and outs of this open world, Terraria-in-space masterpiece from Chucklefish. So I played Starbound, slept, and then played Starbound some more. Within 24 hours of purchasing Starbound on Steam I had played 16 hours. BecauseStarbound is the kind of game that will either bore you to death in fifteen minutes or, if you're like me, completely devour all of your free time. I'm not just talking about the procedurally generated planets, full of acid pools and strange, aggressive monsters. I remember the feeling I got of climbing up, step by step, into the heavens of Terraria, and I think to myself that perhaps I am not running away.Starbound is a dangerous game. When I close my eyes, sometimes, I see myself in a world much like this one, building a staircase of glowing bricks up into the sky. While my body sits, in front of a glowing computer monitor, my mind flies free through my monitor, through a million uncharted worlds.Įverything is possible. It’s terribly small, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m not stuck here, really. It has a keyboard and a guitar and boxes of wires I keep because I might need them some day. Sitting in my room, here, I can’t figure it out.Ībout my room: It has everything I need. Why do I keep trying? Why can’t I stop playing? I’ve fallen down a hole, and now I’m just jumping into other holes hoping one will lead to the way out. I’m lost in an infinite galaxy, and all this power allows me to do is find my way to another infinite galaxy. I keep getting more and more powerful, finding new weapons, making new armor, but I feel so helpless. It feels like I’m running away from something. I go from planet to planet, collecting resources, and then I use those to build a map to the next galaxy, a more dangerous one with more valuable resources, and travel there, and go from planet to planet. I dig through their belongings to find what I need to survive and they do not object. ![]() They talk, but are essentially the same as the animals. I find villages of other creatures, nominal humanoids. The animals look different, but they all behave in the same two ways, cut from two sheets of cloth: Angry and passive. It’s terribly small, but it doesn’t matter much because I can use it to fly to a million different planets.Įach planet is different, somewhat. it has boxes full of dirt, and also full of other boxes, nested impossibly. Then I go up in my space ship and fly off to find another world to do it again.Ībout my space ship: It has everything I need. I pile up rocks, first to build a home, then make simple tools to make digging through the dirt easier. I scrape through the dirt trying to find anything of value. This seems to be the only meaningful difference between them. Strange creatures wander around, and some of them attack me when they see me and others don’t. The sensation is familiar, but the world is a stranger. I’m dropped on a planet with nothing but a few simple imperatives to point the way. ![]()
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