Space noir roguelike Ostranauts aims for 1.0 in 2025, with help from Kitfox as publisher

Post-apocalyptic roguelike Neo Scavenger is one of my favorite games, but its space-faring sequel Ostranauts, currently in Early Access, is just too tricky and complicated for me at the moment. Here’s some good news: Kitfox, masters of making impenetrable roguelikes more hospitable, have joined the project as a publisher ahead of a planned 1.0 release in 2025.

Ostranauts is a “hardcore noir space sim” in which you explore shipwrecks to upgrade and customize your own ship. Every system aboard your ship can be controlled via its own panel of buttons and displays, and it’s virtually inevitable that you’ll die through your own incompetence or carelessness. The only hope is that death is interesting.

I want desperately to create a captain, hire a crew, build a ship, and die in space, but as soon as I see a UI with 18 buttons and no idea what they do, I’m out. Although, quality of life issues aside, Nate had a lot of kind words for Ostranauts around the time of the first launch.

Hopefully Kitfox can help. They’re the publisher behind the recent Steam release of Dwarf Fortress, who helped take that game from ASCII art and obtuse keyboard controls into something much more friendly without sacrificing the spirit or depth of the simulation. They’re also currently working on the 1.0 release of Caves Of Qud, due out later this year, an equally inscrutable roguelike that’s been in development for fifteen years.

Or maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part. Ostranauts is already more visually and readable than both Dwarf Fortress and Caves Of Qud, and there is no specific mention of work to make the game understandable in the announcement of the Kitfox collaboration.

Either way, I’m looking forward to giving Ostranauts another shot when it’s fully released. Neo Scavenger is truly brilliant: a roguelike set in a hand-crafted world where you’re just as likely to die from eating the wrong mushrooms as from getting into a hard fistfight with an alien. It has the best combat of any game released in 2014.