Usually an apocalypse is pretty final, at least for a while. The long, slow recovery gives rise to a world that's safe for a while, because how many meteor strikes, nuclear winters or mad god rampages can reasonably be expected over the millenia? And then there's Arcadia-7, orbiting the appropriately-named star Ruptura. A sun's one job is to give off a warm, constant glow, consistently lighting up and heating the planets in its orbit despite the occasional solar flare. Ruptura, on the other hand, has a consistent eruption cycle that scours the surface of Arcadia-7b clean, leaving nothing alive in its wake. Technically this should mean the planet is a lifeless ball of barbecued dirt, but instead the plants regenerate and the wildlife comes back as mean and ornery as ever. If it wasn't for all the natural resources a prisoner could be forced to process and ship out, humanity would have no use for the place at all.
Making the Best of a Good Planet Orbiting a Bad Star
StarRupture is a survival game with automation elements that's been looking nice for a while now, and it's just about to start its first playtest. The game is designed with co-op in mind, but the first playtest will be for the single-player experience, and I've been playing it somewhat obsessively over the last several days. It's unquestionably early, with everything that implies, but ignoring the expected bugs and awkwardness of a first-look playtest, there's a fantastic survival game coming into focus.
The playtest is technically a limited chunk of the game, comprising the tutorial and a section of the planet to explore, but for those who enjoy exploring and building everything a game has to offer, it can already consume a good number of hours. Starting off as the only one available of what will eventually be four selectable characters, it quickly becomes clear that the company that dumped you here views you as a debt repayment service and not much else. Sure, they'll revive you in a new meat-sleeve on death but with a reminder that the first one is free and the rest will cost. Debt and its repayment isn't actually part of the playtest, though, so it's hard to know quite yet how that will factor into the gameplay.
The initial landing spot isn't much good for anything but is the gateway to a valley rich with mineral deposits and natural resources. The landing pod has a couple of food packs and a Basic Item Printer, and you've got a mining laser plus the ever-handy building tool, but other than that you're on your own. Starting off by harvesting a large meteor, the tutorial takes you through building a base core and a protective living habitat. The base core's main function is to provide a place to build, throwing up a shield that protects all equipment inside from the worst of Ruptura's storms, while the habitat is needed to preserve a squishy human body from the overwhelming heat that would burn it to ash.
The landing pod only needs to be visited once before the first base can be built, and that's due to it having a printer that can combine titanium and wolfram (best thought of as space-steel and space-copper, despite wolfram being tungsten and more grey than coppery in color) into all-purpose building material. All structures are made of building material, from the habitat to the components inside, the orbital cargo launcher to send resources into space, miners to extract mineral resources and a smelter to turn them into ingots, rails to transport one component to the next machine in line, etc. It doesn't take long to learn to always have a full stack of building material in inventory, and seeing as that stack holds a good thousand units, it can last for a bit.
StarRupture is unquestionably early, with everything that implies, but ignoring the expected bugs and awkwardness of a first-look playtest, there's a fantastic survival game coming into focus.
First, though, is the need to earn some tech with a couple of low-impact missions, just enough to get the basics of StarRupture's automation system started. If you've played an automation game before it's all standard stuff, with miners going to smelters to assemblers, etc. All the materials show the number of seconds it takes to manufacture an item, most of which are quick and not actually requiring more than a single assembler to supply multiple cargo launchers. While the automation is the focus of the tutorial, StarRupture is more a survival game than a factory-builder, which becomes clear once the free-play section of the playtest opens up. Still, before venturing out too far into the world, it's probably a good idea to send the requested items to a few of the companies listed in the Corporate Terminal in order to earn their rewards. The safety of the tutorial area only lasts as long as you hang out there and there's a much larger world to explore once the walls come down.
Automation-lite, Survival Adventure-Heavy
Outside of the starter base are new elements, different plants that can be researched to create new stat-enhancing foods, ruins left behind by former colonists who all met terrible ends, and seriously hostile wildlife that doesn't appreciate anyone stomping through their territory. The mining laser can double as a weapon in a pinch, but it's better to supply the Griffith Blue Corporation with their requested wolfram ingots to earn the pistol tech, with bullets easily crafted at the printer. Clever Robotics has a nice storage depot as one of its tech rewards, though, so earning that to have an automated supply of building material and ammo isn't the worst idea either. And then, finally, it's off into the world to get your face eaten by vicious swarming hopper-creatures, or coated in acid-slime, or possibly turned into charcoal by a solar flare.
Ruptura's explosions happen about once every half hour or so, and are both an impressive force of nature and a handy way to reset Arcadia-7's resources. There's a good advanced warning before the sun goes off, giving plenty of time to sprint back to home base, but if that's not an option, then you'd better have a handy asteroid core and some building material in inventory to toss up a new one. The sky starts rippling, the music gets ominous as strange booms ripple across the landscape, the wind picks up as the light turns orange and then the sun's flare whitens the sky. Even then you've still got a second or two to get to shelter as a wave of destruction sweeps across the valley, and assuming you're inside already watching it from the safe side of a window there's nothing to do but wait while the firestorm rages. It takes about thirty seconds or so for the outside to cool down enough to venture into again, and after the red-hot firestorm, everything is grey with low visibility while ash blows everywhere. Arcadia-7 is functionally dead.
But only mostly-dead, and as your local miracle worker may have mentioned, there's a big difference between mostly-dead and all-dead. As the ash settles down and the air clears, patches of green start to sprout as the planet takes several minutes to wake back up again. This includes hostile wildlife, so while the creatures are burned away, it's a great opportunity to get to areas that may have been a little more overrun than the current weapon loadout could handle. On top of that, the grey of the world means the orange jumpsuit on any of your dead bodies pops right out, so scavenging back lost items is much easier. Nature is healing, and that includes all the plants harvested from the last solar flare, so once life has re-grown it's a good idea to stock up and give the cooking station a workout. Dying of monsters is expected, but dying of thirst or hunger due to poor planning is somewhat less impressive than a valiant stand against an overwhelming foe.
The StarRupture playtest "features over three hours of gameplay" and I'm thinking that may be underselling it a bit. So far I've discovered ruins, realized that platforms and stairs can go anywhere so there's no reason not to build a base on top of a mountain that technically should be inaccessible, researched my way up the tech tree, and explored every nook and cranny I could get to. There are blue walls defining the edge of the playtest's boundaries, but they're fairly far off, and fighting through the wildlife to get there while filling in the map can be a decent challenge. At the moment there's not a lot of reason to build the more complicated factories shown off in the trailer, but the tech level only goes up to level 6 or 7, depending on the company supplying it, and the map doesn't extend far enough for some of the later resources that will be needed to be processed. There's a lot more StarRupture to come, but the playtest provides a great first look at surviving on a planet where even its sun wants you dead.
StarRupture
- Released
- 2025
- Developer(s)
- Creepy Jar
- Publisher(s)
- Creepy Jar
