Ran into this as part of a Humble Bundle. I'd never heard of it but it seems to be reasonably popular. I've found it fairly addictive.
Setting: Game is mostly 1st person. You are one clone in a crew of clones, sent to scout a nearby galaxy for colonization aboard a modular expandable spacecraft. There are planets to explore, salvage to acquire, technology to research, pirates, and a lot of alien beasties who build nests on your ship and spawn like crazy. Your ship has crawlspaces under the floors where it's easy for them to hide, so you have to sweep occasionally. They attack you on planets and sneak aboard your harvesting ship with the ore that you mine. If your PC dies, you become another one of the clone crew and take over as captain. It's important to keep plenty of clones around. It's also a "rogue-lite" game, meaning that you'll play through more than once (failures are likely) and some of your accomplishments and discoveries can carry over.
So...
1) Building a defensible and practical ship
2) Researching a tech tree. You need particular materials to research. Multitudes of weapons, upgrades, and you can clone crewmates with added alien DNA for different attributes.
3) Lots of 1st person shooting. Lots.
4) Jump scares. Quite a few "what the heck IS that thing?" moments. Crawling around below deck with a flashlight and hunting bugs. There's an obvious "Alien" component here. No bursters but you can lose a ship to infestation pretty easily.
5) Also lots of "oh, crap" moments when you realize you made a fatal mistake somewhere and now you're doomed. Maybe it was ship design, maybe it was hanging out in that risky system too long trying to find a rare substance or artifact and the pirates boarded you, maybe not having the right crew. Plenty of opportunity to go sideways, but it's USUALLY your own dang fault.
Cons
- Some of the things the game makes you do are not highly logical within the game. Most of them are there to force the player to do something or act a certain way, but if you were really there - not so much. I find that annoying.
- The 1st person movement took me a little while to get used to. YMMV, but I dealt with slight motion sickness/headache at first.
- There's a good bit that isn't explained well for the newcomer. Takes patience, research, luck, or a combination to figure out what you're supposed to do sometimes. Some of this is add-ons and now-included DLC, so wasn't built into the tutorials.
But I'm having a lot of fun with it.
