SPACEPLAN

While browsing the Google Play Pass library, I noticed SPACEPLAN and was intrigued by how much it reminded me of Universal Paperclips. That game surprised me from start to finish with absolutely everything it did and remains one of my favorites to this day. SPACEPLAN, while reminiscent of Universal Paperclips in its structure and premise, doesn't quite live up to the game I wanted it to be. However, it had some surprising moments of its own and was still definitely fun enough to finish.

SPACEPLAN is an idle game, but it separates itself from the pack with its higher degree of interactivity and its story. You're stuck on a ship in space with only the ship's AI to keep you company. While you obviously want to get home, you're not sure how, and you wouldn't have the resources to get there, anyway. What follows are your attempts to solve those problems with the help of the AI, resulting in a weird time-traveling, dimension-hopping, planet-exploring journey. All the while, you're tapping away like it's Cookie Clicker.

The UI in this game also deserves praise. With both form and function in mind, it conveys the feeling of a futuristic spaceship interface while dividing the things you need to interact with into logical locations. At the bottom of the screen at all times is a little square button. Tapping that button generates watts to power your ship. You make progress in the game by using your banked watts to power your ship enough to run scans, travel to new locations, and more. However, those important functions quickly become prohibitively expensive if you don't find another way to generate watts. Fortunately, your AI companion is constantly thinking up new potato-powered technologies that will do that work for you, it just takes a little energy to build and launch them.

The cycle of getting new tech to generate watts and using those watts to get new tech persists throughout the whole game and makes up most of the gameplay. Every once in a while, you'll do one of the story-progressing actions and have a fun little conversation with the AI, but then you'll be right back to the cycle again. Thankfully, watching those numbers climb feels really satisfying, and the inclusion of an actual narrative means the work has an end goal. I wasn't very impressed with the ending itself, and I felt like it dragged on unnecessarily long, but the journey to it was a lot of fun.

SPACEPLAN managed to break into a genre known for pointless, predatory, free-to-play games as a premium experience that both has a purpose and actually cares about its players. While it's not the best game I've played that does this, it is still a great time, and the amount of humor was a nice surprise. For how short of an experience it is, especially if you take advantage of the AFK watt generation, it's virtually impossible for it to get stale before you've finished it, likely making it one of the best idle games out there! For just three dollars, I think it's worth a shot.

The game is available for Android here (as of 12/2/23): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devolver.spaceplan&hl=en_US&gl=US
The game is available for iOS here (as of 12/2/23): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spaceplan/id1200864554
The game is available for Steam here (as of 12/2/23): https://store.steampowered.com/app/616110/SPACEPLAN/

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