Aethus
What a breath of fresh air this is. Aethus was a hidden gem I stumbled across recently and has been a real joy to play. You land on a planet and start a mining operation, but unlike many other survival/craft games, this one is heavily driven by story and discovery. There's a reason you landed on this planet, and as you delve deeper, you discover more about what was going on here. Progression is very crafting focused, often needing things like servos or power cells to progress, and there's a good shortcut system built in for getting around. The game is highly customisable and has a really addictive gameplay loop of advancing materials.
Pros
- The whole game is voice acted
- Runs really well
- Exploration is rewarding, and I felt driven to keep finding out what came next
- There's a great building system for building your base. Large, specialised hab units that you can snap together with corridors and LOADS of placeable objects
- Lots of crafting stations and smelters
- You can place any object in the game as decor
- If you don't like survival mechanics, you can ignore or turn them off
- Great background music
- The few minor (non-progression blocking) bugs I came across, the developer fixed within a couple of days, and is very active on Discord