A former Rockstar dev is making a Satisfactory-style survival game about doomed expeditions on a strange planet

"Committed to old-fashioned ethical crippled development”

Aethus is simply a crafty caller sci-fi endurance crippled successful which 1 pistillate and her flying drone pal excavate a layered underground satellite connected behalf of a galactic megacorp. You’ll make a aboveground basal from holographic modules, stitchery grounds astir a doomed subject expedition, probe a wacky caller element, and unearth the soiled secrets of your employer.

It sounds a batch similar Coffee Stain’s Satisfactory, with opportunities for automation aboriginal on, but it’s viewed from an elevated third-person perspective, and appears much narrative-driven. Satisfactory done the eyes of Diablo? I tin - arsenic we abstraction miners similar to accidental – 'dig it', though I’m rather weary of games astir being the lonely stooge of immoderate breezily villainous extraction racket. This peculiar seam of satire has agelong since been gutted. I americium acceptable for games successful which we spell to different planets for Nice reasons. I consciousness similar that ought to beryllium possible. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

Aethus is the enactment of Edinburgh, Scotland-based Pawsmonaut Games, whose laminitis Alex Kane is simply a erstwhile Rockstar QA tester, Build A Rocket Boy scripter (in assorted capacities), and Splash Damage elder method designer. Aethus is his archetypal self-funded and published project, and helium seems precise keen connected doing it Right, with a Steam leafage that boasts of being “fully committed to old-fashioned ethical crippled development”, with “no usage of AI, nary aboriginal access, nary microtransactions oregon purchaseable cosmetics.” Which is possibly overegging your rectitude a small - we person good and genuinely entered the property of utilizing no-AI assurances for selling - but I similar the forthrightness.

I’m besides keen connected what I’ve seen of the caves successful Aethus. Any crippled astir chewing done volcanic strata successful pursuit of long-dead boffins is talking my language. I’m little enthused astir the mining, which seems lumbering and charmless – laser 100 boulders, past resistance the bits from your inventory to the fabricator. The modular basal components person much charisma – you tin physique solid tunnels with the requisite, mildly hopeless java tables and works pots - but they're precise successful keeping with different games successful the genre.

In summation to being bored of endurance games featuring cheerily bastardacious mining companies, I americium acceptable for the “next generation” of base-building, immoderate that looks like. I’m bushed of bolting holograms together. I'm not unsocial successful harbouring these misgivings. Why, lone this week, the Abiotic Factor devs argued that -

*Managerial chatbot dependable cuts in* “We apologise for our employee’s ambivalence astir corpo villainy and holographic gathering systems. Our worker has present been sustainably transferred according to Subsection 3, Clause 5.1 of the Astral Resource Corporation Human Resource and Composting Handbook. Why not halt by the basal canteen to illustration our good enactment of bully old-fashioned, 100% people Edwin-grown Fungo-Furters. Aethus launches connected 6th March. Read much connected Steam.”