Astroneer

This one has been on my radar for a while. It’s available through Game Pass, and also for the Switch. It’s an open world, open ended game with a cartoony look and feel to it. You wander around a randomly generated planet, exploring, gathering resources, and crafting. It should be right up my alley.

While the design and aesthetic as simple and cartoony, the controls are not. The first time I tried the game, I quit in frustration because I couldn’t figure out the first tutorial. This time around, I was a little more patient, but really only discovered things through trial and error. Now see, normally I like games that you have to tinker with to get, but in this case, I would have liked a little more hand-holding to get the controls and systems down before having to figure things out. Graveyard Keeper, for example, seems equally as dense and complicated, but I never felt like I was floundering the way I did with Astroneer.

But after a couple hours of floundering, I did start to figure things out. It does feel good to start moving forward after struggling with something. I haven’t made it very far, but it looks like there’s a whole chain of things to unlock and build. The world is interesting, if a little lonely. But it looks like there’s some automation features to play with that might make the resource gathering a little more interesting at least.

I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll get back to this one. At least when I do pick it back up, I’ll have a better idea of how it works. But right now, it’s just not quite interesting enough to pull me away from the other games I’m playing around with. A game this old is probably done with development, which is too bad, because it feels like it could really be something with a proper tutorial and maybe a control overhaul.