PPG Game Of The Year 2024 - 49 - What's Your Favourite Thing About Space? Mine is Space.

All of these games are set in space! What a surprise, right? Spanning genres and gameplay styles, this mix is for all those people out there who grew up staring up at the stars and letting their mind run wild with possibility.

LONESTAR (EA)
2D Shipbuilding Roguelike
Small slice of FTL mostly just in looks, with a cool shockwave style battle system. A neat story generator that's already great with more to come.

Between The Stars
Action Combat RPG
A space action RPG with a large procedural universe to explore, shenanigans to get into and upgrades to make. Plenty of great missile and laser combat.

Underspace (EA)
Lovecraftian Freelancer
One weird thing about many space games is precisely that they are not weird enough. Sci-fi media of the pre-2010s promised us a world of imagination, which this game delivers on. Actual gameplay sits in the classic Freelancer vein.

Universal Conquest
Alien Conquest Simulator
I love the dedication to the bit in this game that is "based on principles - and developed in consultancy with - alien contactees". It looks a bit clunky but there's a great 4X underneath that UI and style.

Space Prison
Prison Survival Simulator
A tactical RPG with social sim elements set inside a space prison. A “bunch of different systems interacting to create interesting outcomes” type of game.

Starcom: Unknown Space
Asteroids But Exploration RPG
A top down space exploration game that takes the very base mechanics of Asteroid and adds a ton more systems. Explore unknown space, upgrade your ship and try to find a way back home.

Star Trucker
Haul Cargo Across Space
Euro Truck Simulator but in space instead of on land. Space hauling has been a part of space games for decades, yet somehow no one has put actual trucks into space, until now.

Beyond Galaxyland
SciFi/Fantasy Epic RPG
I almost looked over this one as the art style can be a little hard to latch onto at first glance (it is actually gorgeous), but there's a deep, fun cosmic scale RPG romp here that contains an interesting blend of RPG mechanics.

And The Best Space Game Of 2024 Is…

Between Horizons
Choice Based Branching Paths
A sci-fi follow up expanding on the great choice based approach from the dev's previous also excellent debut game Lacuna. Attempting to find the culprit behind the jeopardization of a generational ship's journey leads to an array of branching paths, with a whole host of different possible conclusions available.