Starmancer lets you live out your inhuman resources fantasies

Time Stamp: March 7, 2022 5:46 AM

Sinister AIs have been a mainstay in science fiction media for a long while now. From the classic Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to GLADOS in Valve’s Portal games, our fear of being controlled by intelligent machines still remains. Unlike most gaming takes on this idea, Starmancer lets you play as the AI – giving you free rein to manipulate and control the expendable meatbags under your command. Available now in Early Access on Steam and Gamepass for PC, I’ve spent some time getting to grips with the ghost in the machine and it’s shaping up to be an interesting title, although there’s still some work for the 2 person development team to do.

Starmancer is mercifully short of overblown narrative or plot. You are the AI of a stranded space station that must try to reconnect with your fleet. That’s pretty much it for story but that’s all you really need. Clearly taking influence from the classic FTL the real narrative here comes from the emergent storytelling of the various randomised interactions and character types. There is a solid tutorial section that briefly introduces you to the main systems and takes you through to unlocking your warp drive but from there on you’re on your own.

Graphically, Starmancer is cute in a very old school way. The colour palette reminds me of my childhood playing home computers like the Amstrad CPC464 but the pixel graphics are actually very effective and clear. This is vitally important as the screen can get very busy – especially when you are saving resources to expand your station. Most of your interactions take place through a series of menus and contextual checkboxes and these are easy to navigate and well designed.

Following the relatively easy-going tutorial, things heat up pretty fast – literally in one of my attempted playthroughs as the whole station set on fire and I couldn’t work out how to put it out (the answer is to vent the oxygen out of the room affected apparently). You harvest humans from a range of possible characters with their own strengths and weaknesses. There is some degree of choice as to which you select but this is limited each ingame day and often you end up just taking what you can get. Whatever their personality the human will be harvested in a broken state and will only follow basic orders and primal instincts (which is pretty much the human condition to be honest). The result is a very pliable workforce but one that will also poo on the floor and sleep in it if you don’t provide basic hygiene solutions.

The gameplay loop of Starmancer is pretty compelling once you get into the swing of things but you’ll probably know pretty early on whether this is a game you want to persevere with. I enjoyed my time with it, but I did encounter some frustrating bugs and crashes with the preview build. Some menus became inaccessible at times and the screen navigation controls were occasionally unresponsive. A couple of attempted runs were spoiled by hard crashes though there is an autosave that’s set to every 10 minutes by default; I’d recommend lowering this limit until the game is more stable.

Bugs and crashes are par for the course with Early Access titles, though, so don’t be put off if this looks like your kind of game. The 2 person dev team are working hard and keeping in regular contact with the players which is great to see. Even if you have access to the game on Game Pass I’d recommend checking out the Steam forums and game Discord for tips and advice. With a bit more stability Starmancer looks set to be a worthy successor to FTL and the perfect game for anyone looking to roleplay being a soulless AI or human resources manager (they’re the same thing aren’t they?).

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