Space whale city builder Beyond These Stars has been delayed till 2025, developers Balancing Monkey Games have announced, for there are too many monkeys to balance, and too many astral cetaceans to wrangle before the early access launch. I react to this news with mingled happiness and disappointment. Disappointment at the delay, and happiness, because I hadn’t heard of Beyond These Stars before. To coincide with the delay announcement they’ve released a new trailer, below, which talks us through the business of foraging on passing planets. It looks engrossing.
If you missed Kaan’s (RPS in Gamesradar) announcement post from February 2023, Beyond These Stars sees you raising a hex-based settlement on the back of an enormous interstellar animal. The creature is named Kewa, and its hide is rich in resources and buildable terrain.
Being a literally living, breathing world, however, it will be affected by your presence. In the course of the campaign, you must decide whether to form a symbiotic partnership with your host, or treat the beast as brusquely as I treat my own allotment grow bags, and plunge it into sickness and sorrow. Myself, I would probably avoid irritating the planet-sized whale, if only because any other star-faring species you encounter will take note of the state of your companion, and respond to you appropriately.
Beyond These Stars is, in general, very much an eco-fable that strives to avoid any suggestion of conquering territory and stripping it raw. This extends to the choice of resourcing and building options. You’ll have to think about irrigation and topsoil quality while maintaining tree populations to cultivate a healthy atmosphere.
All this sits atop more generic building sim questions that perhaps encourage you to play more callously, such as structure adjacency bonuses and worker travel times. I always find it interesting to read about how games such as this try to resist the build-exploit-expand rhythms of their genre. As for the visual presentation in the trailer: the vital space whale component gets a bit lost behind the menus, but it all seems rather gorgeous, with water spilling through canals and clouds foaming up over forest canopies.
Anything you can’t find on Kewa, you might be able to find by sending a rocket to establish an outpost on a nearby planet. This isn’t space colonialism, the developers insist. The planets in question once “belonged” to the ancestors of your citizens, aka Peeps. As such “the Peeps are effectively reclaiming land that used to be theirs; we took care to ensure no implication that they would be displacing any other beings in the process.”
The townsfolk are, moreover, “strictly vegetarian”, so they won’t be eating any of those adorable space chickens and space cows you see on the Steam page. Nor will they be mining the planets they land on, though this is more for the sake of keeping the focus on Kewa than avoiding any historical parallels. I think there’s perhaps a touch of “having your 4X empire cake and eating it” here, but I respect the commitment to themes and playstyles beyond setting up oil rigs all over.
As for the release delay into 2025, “it’s very important for us that we take the time to implement everything properly for our Early Access launch, and that we do so in a way that doesn’t burn out our team,” the developers write. “Because of this, our initially projected 2024 release date has had to shift.” While you wait, you might want to check out The Wandering Village.