Astroneer

The Astroneer reshapes the environment using the Terrain Tool

Astroneer is a sandbox adventure game played from a third-person view. Its open world planets, wherein terraforming can take place, are subject to procedural generation, with the exception of some planet specific resources. The player controls an astronaut (called an Astroneer) who navigates on foot, by rover, through teleportation, or by spacecraft.

The game doesn't have any set storyline, but it does contain optional tasks and missions that can result in lore and narrative via cutscenes and data logs.

The player departs from a man-made interstellar spacecraft that is from an unknown planet and lands on Sylva, the starting planet. It is then up to the player to decide what to do. In order to advance the main storyline, the player must discover and activate an alien Gateway Chamber and dig into the planet. There are different subterranean layers with varying difficulty, most notably containing hazards and terrain that becomes harder as you dig deeper into the planet. Once the player reaches the last layer, they need to dig down from an alien pylon. They travel to the Gateway Engine and activate it with a material that progressively gets harder to obtain, depending on the difficulty of the planet. The player must obtain 2 Geometric Tryptics and place one on a terminal on top of them and one to keep when they reach the satellite. The player can safely warp to any Gateway Chamber that they have activated. This process is repeated for the rest of the planets and moons, Desolo, Calidor, Vesania, Novus, Glacio, and Atrox, listed from easiest to hardest. Once the player has procured all 8 tryptics, they can travel to a Gateway Portal and place them in their respective slots. An Odd Stone will appear in the middle. Interacting with it will roll the end scene and credits.

It is also noted that there are other storylines which include, The Wanderer's Way mission, The Space Snail rescue mission, The Rails Update mission chain, The Awakening Update mission chain, Holiday Events, and numerous Easter Eggs.

If the player completes the main story, rails, and space snail missions, along with producing nanocarbon alloy, a resource in the game, they can access the Awakening Update missions, which include references to the community, the other missions, and the book "The Little Prince", which is what some of the update's themes are based on.

The game came about after Adam Bromell showed his friend Paul Pepera a "personal art project" consisting of a space man. According to Bromell, the two "started kind of riffing on this, like is there a possibility of a game in here?" Eventually, Pepera contacted two of his friends and the four started System Era to develop the game. At first, they worked on the game only part-time, after about two years of development Bromell in an interview stated that they were about ready to commit to the project full time.[5]

The art style was partly inspired by a desire by Bromell to get away from something that looked like Minecraft, stating "there are enough games that do that already." Instead, the team adopted an art style that consists of "curved geometric, sort of broad vibrant colors." Bromell notes that the "no-frills" art style served a practical purpose as well, as it let them quickly build new ideas into the game. Initially, the game used a more traditional high-polygonal style, however after participating in a diorama building contest concerned with the "low-poly" style, he changed his mind.[5]

Astroneer was announced in October 2015 by System Era Softworks[6] and is developed with the Unreal Engine 4.[7] Co-founder and lead artist Paul Pepera died on March 27, 2017, 4 months after Astroneer's early access release, but before the official release of the game.[8][9]

Astroneer was first released in early access for Steam, Windows and Xbox One on December 16, 2016, before it officially released on February 6, 2019.[10][11] A PlayStation 4 version was released on November 15, 2019, and released for the Nintendo Switch on January 13, 2022.[12]

Astroneer received "mixed or average reviews" from critics for Windows and Xbox One, and received "generally favorable reviews" for Nintendo Switch, according to review aggregator Metacritic.

Shacknews gave the game an eight out of ten, praising the atmosphere, exploration, crafting, base building, setting, casual survival elements, cooperative play, and pleasing aesthetics, while criticizing some minor technical issues.[21] USgamer said that the game was "on the soft side of the survival spectrum", ultimately concluding that "[...] Astroneer falters in not having more interesting things to find within each planet. In the end though, it's a lovely little game if you want to survive without all the pesky hunger and thirst you find in other games."[22] GameSpot lauded the game's aesthetics, art direction, accessible survival mechanics, oxygen tethering mechanic, and wide open spaces, while similarly taking issue with cumbersome inventory management, lack of interesting things to do on each planet, and technical issues. Nintendo Life reviewed the Switch port, praising the developer support, crafting, terrain tool, and how well the game suited the console, while calling out the choppy framerate, janky physics, and bad camera and controls.[23]

In March 2022, System Era Softworks reported that Astroneer had sold over 3,740,000 units and had been played by over 8 million players.[24]

• Official website