Space For Sale, space construction by THQ Nordic in preview

showcase THQ Scandinavian It was undoubtedly important, and the broadcaster managed to add numerous trailers with discreet grace to the 45 minutes of the show. However, among the many games on offer, there were only four absolute innovations, and given the brand’s importance, Alone in the Dark was bound to stand out the most. Still, in the newcomers group, another title caught our attention, thanks to its cartoony look and interesting underlying idea: We’re talking about Space For Sale, a kind of weird management “city builder”, but not all city centers are built here, but the goal is to be all over the galaxy. to make alien planets habitable for customers.

At the reins of the project, Mirage Game Studios – good Little Big Workshop developers – and from what we’ve seen, chances are you have a little gem of humor in your hands. Here’s what they told us Space For Sale preview.

Space, the final frontier of construction

There Premise Of Sale for Sale is a classic: your alter ego has huge debts to pay off to an alien construction company, and the only way to pay them off is to throw a triple mayhem at the most thankless jobs this has to offer. Considering that said company operates on a galactic scale, the best way to be useful is to take a fair percentage of the land sold, making habitable planets normally fraught with dangers.

Yes, in other words, Area for Sale is not a “usual” management system, since its predecessor seems to guarantee exactly the hero’s constant movements during the campaign. Armed with a spacesuit and fantasy, your little man should not, in fact, stay too long in the various celestial bodies, because once he has satisfied the client it will be necessary to move on to other ecosystems. This greatly separates the game from a game. city ​​builder or away from a classical management system due to ever-changing situations, as well as the previous work of the team, which relies on the constant evolution of a small factory and the constant increase in difficulty level. Ah, it looks like environments will be partially procedurally generated, so each game will be an experience in itself.

However, the special nature of the game does not mean that there is no underlying complexity. Mirages, this is still a sandboxwhere resource recovery and land management are essential. In addition, due to the already underlined unfamiliar nature of customers, an increased difficulty with the absurdity of requests should be guaranteed. In fact, if most of the time you just have to be content with building functional homes, in other, more bizarre cases, you may have to meet no-nonsense needs, such as building lava-filled pools; We are seriously wondering how far the mission objectives will go and how they will change by planet.

Builders, not warriors

The complexity doesn’t seem to end with the requests: we didn’t go into a certain depth of the mechanics at the time of the presentation, but it’s clear that at the core of the game is a fairly elaborate house-building system. Too many possibilities to shape an energy web (and possibly water if logic demands). That wasn’t enough, it requires facilities materials will be placed, and this is where the collection, which so emphasizes exploration, comes into play.

Every planet has flora and fauna no shortage of surprises as they are unique and alien plants and creatures; Therefore, it is not right to approach everything seen without thinking: large flowers may burst easily, and the behavior of animals may be nothing more than peaceful.

There fauna it is also at the heart of the game because the person’s alter ego is not a warrior and cannot actively fight against animals that have proven to be aggressive. Therefore, apart from simple escape, in the title it seems possible to render some creatures harmless simply by exploiting the surrounding environment. An interesting example was a kind of strange space crab with a great love for fruit: after feeding on a sleeping plant, ours fell asleep, allowing us to safely recover minerals from its shell. We suspect there will be many similar situations during the campaign.

Other beauties? The simple story of Space for Sale seems to be tied not only to your debts but also to some strange “space corruption”, in fact, Space Decaywhich must be resisted at all costs in order to make certain areas livable. In addition, the game also has a cooperative mode potentially hilarious, but limited to just two players for now, and the additional options it offers in terms of gameplay have not yet been analyzed in detail.