Supernatural spaceship shooter Underspace shows admirable ambition in its Next Fest demo

rockpapershotgun.com:

I respect a game with wild ambition. Declaring your game "the spiritual successor to Freelancer" is bold and ambitious, considering how the spaceship sim is still so beloved after 20 years that our readers voted it your 16th favourite space game of all time. This ambition is wild when the tiny development team is led by someone best known for replacing Skyrim's dragons with Thomas The Tank Engine. So while I'm not much of a spaceship sort, I had to check out the demo for Underspace, which aims to combine Freelancer shoot-o-trading space action with a dash of Lovecraftian horror.

While the Steam Next Fest ended on Monday, you can still download Underspace's demo from Steam (or if you'd rather not get Steamy, an older demo is on Itch).

I am instantly delighted that, while it's visibly made by a tiny team, it's introduced with cinematics and a first-person scripted sequence. I like that we're dropped into the universe an existent person with a history and friends. I really like that I can walk around a handful of areas on the space station which could functionally be menus but wouldn't be the same if they were. I like how this feels like a teeny, low-fi version of Mass Effect's Citadel, with weird species of bug and crystal and robot casually hanging out. I like that it let me spend my meagre starting cash at a bar on a photograph whose use I do not remotely know. It's the best kind of ambition: for more than it can perhaps achieve, reaching to be more, a plucky game you want to root for.

Singleplayer spaceship shoot-o-traders aren't really my sort so I can't really judge what folks might make of it against other games (including Freelancer). Flight controls and combat are definitely arcade-y and scrappy; it's certainly not spacewitch shooter Chorus. I was bumbling on, not sure I was digging it, then a spacestorm hit and the flashes illuminated impossibly vast octopoid tendrils beneath the fabric of reality and I had to fight a giant skeletal snake to kill the storm