Review liketheaward 3/5 · Aug 20, 2025
OK. Seems incomplete on Switch
You play a cute little robot in the distant future where humanity has spread out across the galaxy and 1) gotten so carried away with generic engineering that the gene pool has lost most of its diversity and is collapsing due to the resulting unavoidability of what is effectively inbreeding, and 2) the knowledge of Earth's coordinates has been lost …
You play a cute little robot in the distant future where humanity has spread out across the galaxy and 1) gotten so carried away with generic engineering that the gene pool has lost most of its diversity and is collapsing due to the resulting unavoidability of what is effectively inbreeding, and 2) the knowledge of Earth's coordinates has been lost and Earth is even regarded as a myth by many. As a desperate last resort, a group of scientists are trying to locate Earth in the hopes they might find genetic material that's a close enough match to combine with modern human DNA to restore genetic diversity and save us from extinction.
The game alternates between the main gameplay mechanic of scanning a star field with a telescope to locate systems that fit criteria provided by a "Locator" program in your ship's computer and scan them, story beats that unlock new areas of your ship as you scan more systems, and point-and-click style exploration of the ship which feeds data into the Locator programs to give you more scanning objectives.
For the core planet scanning to advance the main plot, the "Earth Locator" computer gives you criteria for potential Earth systems, and you have to find and scan a system matching the criteria - early on they're dead easy, but as you proceed, they get more challenging.
Point-and-click style exploration of the new ship areas you open up feeds data into the "Curiosity Locator" device which provides optional scanning objectives for other points of research interest. These are way more cryptic and challenging than the regular ones.
There were some aspects I found frustrating - there were some objects Emeth (my character) would examine and say he didn't understand, or he forgot he was on a mission, so he'll "come back to this later." There was never any obvious prompt or story event that even hinted I should go back to any of those items, but when I randomly went through the whole ship after rolling credits and just clicked everything I'd already clicked before a second time, many of them created new objectives in my Curiosity Locator, which was a little frustrating to not have realized I could do before rolling the credits.
Even more frustratingly, there's a whole third tab of the telescope interface (the other two being Curiosity Locator optional objectives and Earth Locator main story objectives), for "Hyperspace" objectives, and by the time I rolled credits I hadn't unlocked a single objective, nor did I have any idea how to.
Searching for information online, I only found clues, but nothing conclusive. The very barebones wiki says on the description page for the game: "Even with the storyline done, and a few other finished, the game still expands on the "Episode Packs" included in 6 episodes - each with their own compelling story." But gives no information about how to access or obtain the Episode Packs. On a page for one of the Hyperspace objectives it mentions, "you must purchase Emeth's antenna" to do this objective, but there's no explanation of where/how you purchase it. Is it an item in an in-game MTX shop I hadn't unlocked? A DLC?
I found no DLCs on the Switch eShop, and I found one post on Steam forum with someone asking in 2018 when "Armour's Secret DLC" would come to Switch with the dev account replying, "Hi, sorry that we are not quite sure when will we update 'the armour's secret' dlc, but we will update it as soon as possible, thanks for your asking!" Also another post from 2023 where someone was asking about the same DLC apparently being missing from Steam, with the dev account replying, "Due to some reasons we have remove them from the game, but we have add free episode pack, you can find them in the game."
Seems like the Switch port might just be missing the DLC-exclusive content, and it's a little irritating that the in-game tracker shows a bunch of incomplete DLC objectives even if you don't have the DLC installed and literally can't buy it even if you wanted to. I doubt I would have paid more than $1 for it anyway, considering the original was only $5.
For $5 it was a fun enough 2-hour experience.
