Marketing wank
Enter the lotto here (#alpha-key-lottery room, drawing on Jan 11)
More wank
You play as the unnamed, unvoiced, unseen protagonist in a very steampunk world. The submarine you arrive on is entirely made of polished brass and is captained by the most stereotypical of ship captains.
You can immediately tell a few things from this screenshot. You start with a pickaxe. The red thing on the left says “refinery.” The blue thing on the right says “production.” You’ll be doing lots of mining and then crafting those things into other things.
You do missions for the stereotypical captain. You get no reward for finishing them, aside from the incidentals. The initial quest chain, for instance, involves you being voluntold to mine things, voluntold to craft those things into components, voluntold to kill the evacuees of the pictured damaged shitbox, and then voluntold to install one of your faction’s ship cores for a bit of grand theft drillship.
In this procession of pictographs, you can see me ramming my steely rod (flying the GRG banner) into the planet shortly before it explodes hot sticky stuff everywhere. The island recovers quickly (grass is green and trees have regrown their leaves in about a minute) and is ready to do it again in eighteen minutes.
The end goal is to stop the Cogs (enemy steampunk automaton faction we jacked our own drillship from) from doing whatever it is that they’re doing. They’ve got three drills around the volcano that you need to disable. Conveniently, you need to upgrade your ship over the course of many hours in order to reach drills 2 and 3.
Final thoughts:
This was written at the 30 minute mark. The timer is already grating on me. I’ll probably put a few hours into it anyway. Each of the two unlockable regions add a new resource and journalistic integrity or something like that demands I see them.
At the very least, I’ll revisit the game when updates occur until my access is revoked at the end of the alpha period (projected to be the end of Jan).
Updates:
I received confirmation in their Discord that the first eruption is timed a bit differently. It’s only 10 minutes, I’m assuming so that it’ll show up pretty soon after you’ve hopefully taken ownership of the enemy drillship. I kind of want to start a new game and see if being incompetent leads to a Non-Standard Game Over. That at least explains my experience and I’ve updated the review text to reflect that.