Ostranauts on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Ostranauts is a hardcore noir space-sim. Manage life aboard your ship, and beware the cost of every decision you make. Scavenge and explore the boneyard. Create, build, and customise your ship. Hire a crew to help but remember, nothing is more certain than death and taxes.
Ostranauts is a early access, top-down and cyberpunk game
developed by Blue Bottle Games
and published by Kitfox Games.
Released on September 10th 2020 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 1,792 reviews of which 1,418 were positive and 374 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.6 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 19.50€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Ostranauts into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 SP1+
- Processor: Dual Core 2 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel HD 4600 (AMD or NVIDIA equivalent)
- Storage: 500 MB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This game was made by an insane person. The correct way to play isn't taught to you, and you will doom several characters before understanding what happened. The flight interface is purposefully weird and impossible. Some of the mechanics and missions you rely on are noob-traps or actual outright traps. There's an entire colony-simulator style mechanic that you likely will never reach. Exactly what I was looking for, exactly what I paid for.
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Before I say anything else, I would like to praise the game for having a depth and complexity of systems that has given me 50+ hours of game time, most of which were enjoyable, so the game receives high marks for that alone and its worth the price of admission. Having said that, having invested 50+ hours of time into the game at the time of writing this, I've both seen and discovered through experimentation the limits of the game that has been developed so far, and I find myself frustrated with the constraints of what's been sorely overlooked and what clearly hasn't yet been finished. The game implies and promises an open world with a diverse set of playstyles, but as things currently stand, the game is really only fully developed around one gameplay loop of one particular style of gameplay and not much else at the time of this review. The core gameplay loop involves flying out to derelict vessels in the small system you start the game out in, boarding broken and abandoned ships and then salvaging any valuable loot or in-tact systems like reactors and fuel, fighting the ocassional pirate, then repairing, restoring, and selling those systems/loot on at station kiosks or the black market to steadily increase your bank account, allowing you to improve your ship and eventually earning enough to buy a bigger one, which in turn lets you haul more and more stuff on each of your salvaging trips. There are, however, a few fundamental problems with this gameplay loop that'll eventually leave wanting wanting to stray from the formula, and the moment you do, you really start to see the glaring gaps in design and development not yet finished. For starters, the vast, vast majority of ships you have access to at the start are very small, yet also very expensive. You need a certain amount of space to make sure all your vital systems have room to be installed and maintained. This includes anything from your Nav console where you actually pilot the ship to the fuel canisters and intake valves you'll need to run the thrusters, the oxygen tank that gives life support, heating and cooling systems to keep the cabin conditions livable without an exo-suit, the transponder which is how the game handles your ship ID, ship batteries, and a number of alarm systems and wiring that strings it all together. You need all of this to operate, AND you also need as much cabin space as possible to load the often very large and very cumbersome pieces of tech you strip from the other, bigger ships. It won't be long before you realize you'll need a bigger ship to earn more money, but you'll quickly run into a fundamental problem in that, even on the blackmarket, in perfect restored condition, you are only ever going to earn $20,000 - $80,000 for the big items you take off the derelicts, of which you'll be lucky to fit only one or two onto your small starting ship. The second issue you'll encounter is that, even with fast forward capabilities, everything takes a very, very long time to actually accomplish. Everything from uninstalling a componenet, to repairing it, to then restoring it, takes a lot of in-game time that can take minutes on end even at x16 speed, and that in itself is nothing compared to the tediousness of space travel and having to manually operate the docking and undocking procedure every time you need to land to travel anywhere. The process of leaving the starting port, traveling to a derelict, docking there, stripping it for parts, traveling back to and docking at the port, repairing everything that's broken, then restoring everything to perfect condition for sale, even at high speeds, can often take you anywhere from 45 minutes to over an hour of IRL time, all for what amounts to only $80,000 - $120,000 of in-game currency. This is not an economical use of time, especially when other expenses also chip away at your earnings, like constant docking fees and refueling needs for power, fuel, and oxygen, as well as a mortgage payment that kicks in every in-game shift and penalizes you with late fees if you forget to pay. As it turns out, you don't even own the vessel you start out with, you have to pay off an expensive mortgage that ranges anywhere from $300,000 to over $2M depending on the vessel you wind up with in the beginning, so by the time you're feeling the inadequacies of your starting vessel not only do you not have any money to invest into buying a new one, but you have a mortage to pay off before you can even think about getting a new ship. Even when you're stripping out valuable reactors and rare intake thrusters from giant derelicts, you will be playing most of the game in debt. After the gameplay loop gets boring after awhile, this is where you'll be tempted into expanding into the other avenues of gameplay the game seems to offer, like paid delivery quests or even piracy, but sadly these are underdeveloped or not implemented at all. As to quests, you'll contacted all the time with a hundred different quests that all sound interesting, but the trouble is there's no real way to track where any of them are. Certain NPCs on the port you start in will have some simple social quests to accomplish, but beyond that, the vast majority of the quests your receive both at random and at the "gig board" in the station wind up going to places that are currently inaccessible. Many times the NPCs you need to talk to are on another vessel somewhere in space, with no real way of tracking where that vessel is where it's going. The rest of the time, you'll see lots of quests based in larger and different spaceports, but as things are in the game currently, you have absolutely no way to reach them. All the ship systems that are currently in the game are, so far, designed only to travel around the small starting area. Other systems DO exist, but they are so so far away that no ship battery or fuel system currently exists that has the speed or longevity to reach them. With most current ship systems you have, at most, a few in-game days of power and fuel to travel. The other systems are SO FAR away that even if you use all your fuel to max out your ship speed on normal thrusters, it will take you over a in-game year to reach your destination. Even if you magically could make sure your fuel never runs out and your batteries never die, your character has food, drink, and sleep gauges that need to be constantly micromanaged. With salvaging parts taking too much time for not much money, and with the lucrative quest system mostly broken, you're not left with many legitimate ways to earn real money to buy better ships, so this is where you might start flirting with the idea of playing the game more like a pirate. This IS fun for awhile, and raiding the smaller stations in the starting area's perimeter as well as patrol vessels turns out to be more of a guarantee of good loot than the random junk you can often wind up with docking with derelicts, but you still suffer from a lack of cargo space and its ultimately not any more time effective than salvaging. This is where you might get the idea to start stealing patrol ships or finding larger derelicts and patching them up and taking them for yourself, but for me, this is where the game completely fell apart. This is due to the biggest and most frustrating aspect about the entire game, and that's the ship registration and transponder system. Everything your ship does, from paying your mortgage to docking at ports, is dependent on your Transponder ID. If you uninstall your transponder it has an 80% chance to break, meaning you can't even dock at the home port anymore. Even if you DO successfully uninstall it, it cannot be placed anywhere except your starting ship. If you put it in a derelict you've repaired to working order? It doesn't work, put in a stolen patrol ship? Doesn't work. This means there's no real way to have a ship other than buying one, so playing as a pirate? Not possible. Very fun, but not finished.
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I CAN'T STOP PLAYING THIS GAME! PLEASE SEND HELP! I bought this game 15 days ago and already have over 170 hours on my clock... talk about "just one more turn" even though there aren't really turns. Ostranauts easily made into my top favorites after a very short time - here's why: - if you like The Expanse, you're going to love this one as you start out as an unskilled inexperienced teenage Beltalowda who has nothing to their name but the great ambition to get a star ship by any means. - the character creation is fantastic. Even if you keep rerolling to min max it to get your perfect spacer - it WILL create the backstory for you while you go through it. It gives your character more than just stats, it gives life. - I just love games where you go from rags to riches and this is one of them - I already loved Hardspace: Shipbreaker and this game is also all about ship breaking (at first) - Cassette Futurism - if you liked the optics of Alien, 2001, Bladerunner, etc. you're gonna enjoy this one. The UI when navigating or interfacing with your fusion reactor is just awesome. All the buttons work! - You have a lot of creative freedom when it comes to building your ship by incorporating parts of the various derelicts you come across. - This game made me genuinely afraid of the vacuum of space! There is but a thin layer of aluminum and steel that keeps you from dying a rather unpleasant death - and the expression of your character definitely hammers that home. - The first time you come across something unknown or a new kind of danger it gets quite exhilarating - death is always an inch of insulated space suit away! Fight or Flight! (there is no space combat though) They say this game is very hard - howver I have plenty experience with Kerbal Space Program and docking ships while only having to pay attention to two axies is a piece of cake. However there is a ton of things you need to watch out for: Oxygen, Pressure, Temperature, Food, Water, Exhaustions and the inevitable need for sleep and social interaction (however you can satisfy a lot by going full gremlin mode with your PDA) Grab this game and become a licensed ship breaker, a trader, a dodgy scavenger or even a pirate!
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My hours probably speak for themselves. Before I get into it - This game is very janky, very early access, and the learning curve can feel like a cliff, especially if you haven't done a more realistic space sim before. And with that out of the way, I can gush about all the things I enjoy about Ostranauts. Probably first and foremost, it sticks to Neo Scavenger's gritty, ascent/descent of human civilization - High tech, low morals, with humanity having spread throughout the solar system and life generally not being good for the average person. The lore is remarkably deep, with a great deal of allusion to different settlements, organizations, and stranger things that haven't actually been implemented yet - You'll see most of it in ingame 'datafiles' you retrieve from the wrecks you pick over. The gameplay loop as it is also leans into the setting - You're just another shipbreaker, feeble and unfit from a life of neglect living in 0G, and unless you spend precious time ironing out your flaws in character creation, you're just as fragile as anyone else. As the player, there's some cheesing you can do to be an action hero, but one wrong move (or just getting too tired to fight back, or deciding to do a 10G burn for more then a few seconds) can maim or kill you. Speaking of the gameplay, it mostly consists of picking over the bones of derelict ships in Ganymed's boneyard in the current version of the game - You'll start underwater on a mortgage, and you'll have to do whatever it takes to pay off your ship, and likely will be upgrading and retrofitting your ship to better suit your playstyle as you go. There's a number of other options - Chasing gigs, and with the new beta version, trying to make some money on hauling cargo - But the meat of the game is aboard derelicts and the often-tense moments of navigating the boneyard. I've probably written more then most people will read, so I'll wrap it up with this - The game oozes character, the setting and the actual gameplay line up, and your progression (as of the latest version) is several-fold - Improving your skills, your ship, and with enough time and money, gradually mitigating and removing the scars that 0G living have left on your body. It's an exceptionally fresh, close-up take of living in a dystopia science-fiction future, and I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product.
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EA Review for 15-AUG-2024 A hard science based survival simulation based on a horribly dystopian future full of corporate indentured servitude, violence and you. You trying to figure out a way to make it happen, with the odds squarely against you. Follow the rules and be a slave, or find your own way. Fair warning, this game takes a lot of thinking and a moderate amount of luck. It has a steep learning curve, but the adventure can be unusually rewarding. I don't generally give star ratings to early access games but if you're like me, which we both hope you aren't, you'll get a big kick out of this title. I recommend it for smart and probably autistic people.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 07 April 2025 06:03 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 10 April 2025 20:45 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:28 |
| Steam reviews | 13 April 2025 07:49 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Ostranauts, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Ostranauts
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Ostranauts concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Ostranauts compatibility
Online players
126
Developer
Blue Bottle Games
Publisher
Kitfox Games
Release
10 Sep 2020
Platforms