Astrometica Early Access preview — The start of a space journey

Space is serene and beautiful. Looking out into the inky blackness, distant bodies twinkle at the horizon, their promise of mysteries unknown just out of reach. It’s all the stuff of dreams…until it isn’t. Astrometica starts with the worst possible scenario – a cataclysmic and sudden explosion on our ship, casting it adrift into an asteroid belt. The once beautiful and serene world of Astrometica instantly shifts from mysterious and alluring to terrifying and dangerous. Racing against the clock to find any other survivors, we’ll need every bit of survival skill to find a way home…

As you might have guessed, Astrometica is a space exploration and survival crafting game that just recently launched into Early Access on Steam. With roughly a dozen hours of content, it’s a solid start to the dev-in-the-open process – let’s talk about what’s here, and what’s on the horizon.

The game starts with a bang, casting the player adrift. We see a handful of other survivors that we’ll want to find to raise our chances of survival. Through the course of your time with the game, the story is revealed Bioshock-style via audio recordings and logs of what happened with the original mining crew and what they found among the stars. Hint: It’s not good. Exploring the various environments reveals more of these logs, further expanding the lore and establishing a foothold for the team at BeryMery (and publisher Rock Game) to create their world. While a great deal of it is still missing (there is no “third act” content quite yet), you can see the bones where that’ll eventually be built.

Mechanically, Astrometica plays most similarly to a combination of Breathedge and Subnautica. In fact, it starts similarly to both as you are casting yourself into the void with a limited amount of oxygen, making your excursions short and to the point lest they come to a sudden and painful end. And just like those two games, you’ll also need to keep yourself hydrated and with a full belly to survive the rigors of space. Oxygen can be resupplied at your ship, of course, but as you push farther into the asteroid belt, you’ll find chunks of ships in the debris field. These frequently have air bubbles that you can use to not only top off, but also have opportunities to explore. Much like the underwater areas in Subnautica, you’ll place your feet squarely on terra firma (or in this case, often chunks of debris with some overgrowth on it), granting the ability to walk around to hunt for mysteries and logs. The more you press into the vastness of space, the more mystery unfolds, and that’s where Astrometica finds its strength.

Yes, the game does operate very similarly to other games we’ve played, but that’s not necessarily a knock against it. The act of building things and putting in machines to make it run isn’t the lure with these types of games. The moment you step outside of that crashed ship module and see the vastness of space ahead of you with no clear path is precisely what keeps me coming back to Astrometica. Straight ahead I can see debris – ok, I know I need to collect that to build. I now have a makeshift bashy tool to break open crates. Alright, now I have enough components to make a drill and some batteries to run it. Now I can farm resources faster. Backpack, jetpack, expanded O2, food, water – the beats are familiar. Further into the horizon, I think I can see some sort of air bubble. With my improvements, I can now reach it. Inside I can scan the habitat and learn to make my own. Now I have a waypoint to the next horizon. Eventually, I’ll get a vehicle to make this all go a little faster. And so it goes. Turn right and you’ll see more air bubbles, turn left and you see more debris with some flashing lights (don’t go that way – those lights aren’t friendly). The point is the exploration, and that part works.

As this is Early Access, the game is still far from done. That said, the core elements are here, and much of it is solid. There are still some quality-of-life lessons that Astrometica can learn from its contemporaries. With any EA title, there’s room for improvement that’ll come from fan feedback. As a rock-hounding tree-puncher myself, I’ll offer a few of my own for the pile. Being able to craft from a storage box reduces friction to build times, allowing you to create instead of spending valuable time dragging resources into boxes. That said, I do appreciate the ability to pin a recipe – we’re halfway there. Batteries run out way too fast. Trying to place a battery charger in your initial ship gives you a red outline of the device – turns out you can’t make one until you go build a habitat somewhere else. Snapping that hab together is remarkably simple, with the occasional snapping issues. Those sorts of things get ironed out over time. Where Astrometica lacks, in my opinion, is the part that makes the universe come alive.

I’ll use the two popular crafting games I’ve already mentioned as comparison, but I’m going to use a specific point in time – their Early Access moments. Both Breathedge and Subnautica had the personality that Astrometica currently lacks. The former leaned HEAVILY into comedy, with the various puzzles being solved in absurd ways, even early on. The latter was whimsical, with bug-eyed creatures, cute semi-anthropomorphic creatures that’ll happily steal your stuff, and a rounded-edge aesthetic established early on. Astrometica plays it very straight. That’s fine, but what’s here isn’t overly compelling quite yet. The developers need to pick a lane and then run down it full charge. Cosmic horror? Do it – I’m ready for The Cosmic to steal my sanity. Comedy? Been done, so harder, but knock yourself out. Straight space simulation? You’ll need to lean a lot harder into more complex systems. All of these and more are very possible to achieve, but what’s here is very much standing in the middle, needing to pick a path.

The great news is that Astrometica is already fun – that’s the hard part. It gets the core elements right, and they’ve nailed the aesthetic and sense of wonder. There are roughly ten hours worth of content here already, and the developers are active with their community. You can pick this game up on the cheap at this point ($17.99 at the time of writing), and there’s even a demo to give it a spin. What I’ve played is fun, and I suspect once they start filling out the universe behind all of this, you’ll think so too.

Astrometica is currently in Early Access and available on Steam.

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