Autonauts is a game that I have a little over 400 hrs on. It is basically a crafting and building game - you are dropped, alone, on a planet and you have to build a colony. You cut down trees, mine rocks, create tools and work tables that let you gather new resources and build new tools and machines. Rinse and repeat. Pretty standard stuff.
What makes Autonauts different, and what I think might appeal to some here is that you can immediately start building robots (initially out of wood, with an acorn for a brain, as you do. The developers are Scottish, so I am assuming the joke is intentional) and set them to automating all of your tasks. At the start you use a very simple to understand “Watch me” mechanic to create a program for a robot and, as you get more comfortable, you can engage with a simple scripting language that allows you to hand code your bots. The scripting language includes commands for detecting things in the environment, picking up and dropping things, monitoring the environment, and conditionals and control structures that allow you do automate increasingly complicated tasks. Your robots however have limited memory capacity so initially you will have to keep things tight. As you progress you can build robots with more capacity.
So you are building, programming, managing and, very importantly, debugging dozens or hundreds of little robots. As you progress through the game you gain additional capabilities that make it easier to manage the bots, share code between them (initially you have to transfer programs between bots via sneaker net, later there is a central repository for your programs). You can have robots running materials to robots that are building things, robots that build buildings, robots that clear terrain for you, robots that bring materials back and store them, and robots roaming the map looking for robots that have run out of power and need to be wound up again.
Everything can be automated and it’s extremely satisfying to watch your clockwork army going about their duties. It is also extremely satisfying to see that you have made a terrible mistake and now your supply chain is falling apart and it’s all crumbling to dust!
Of course, you are not doing all of this for yourself - you have an infinite supply of freeze dried baby colonists! You, I dunno…hatch? reconstitute? those once the colony is able to support them and the progression in the game is tied to improving their lives - housing, feeding, clothing and educating them. As you provide for more of their needs the level of your civilization goes up until they transcend. Your colonists don’t build or gather anything - they are literally babies that become bigger (much bigger) babies as they advance. They do however, generate Wuv (say it a few times) as you care for them which you gather up and put into machines to generate research.
There is no external conflict in the game - no enemies, no competition for resources, just you against your ability to code your bots and plan your supply chains. You can mess things up, but you can always eventually recover.
For people that enjoy the challenge of managing a complex system made of many smaller, individually understandable, interlocking parts, it’s a rare delight
So, if you are a person that believe “It’s not a game if you can’t lose”, then it’s not going to appeal. But do check out Autonauts vs Piratebots, which is the same game, but focused on fighting off Piratebot raiders, expanding your territory and defeating pirate bases across the map, eventually confronting the Dread Pirate Robot himself. The change in victory conditions and the addition of enemies make it an entirely different experience.
It’s a mouse and keyboard game - no controller support. It is playable on Steamdeck, but using the mouse and keyboard emulation, mapping keys to the Steamdeck buttons, While it is low poly 3d it does need a degree of graphics oomph - GeForce GTX 970 (4096 MB) or Radeon R9 270X (2048 MB) recommended. It won’t run well at all on a non-gaming laptop.
Both Autonauts and Autonauts vs Piratebots are on Steam for $19.99 each or in a bundle for $29.98. I have gotten a lot more pleasure over the years out of it than that.
Oh FUCK! It’s on the Switch!!! For only $9.99 through March 3rd, with, I, assume controller support that will roll back into the PC version at some point. Goodbye. It’s been really nice knowing all of you.
ETA: All of the edits are for typos, grammar, so forth. That’s a lotta typing I can mess up
