What The Stars Forgot is a starship and crew management sim. As the cutting-edge AI on the most advanced research vessel ever built, you have to guide a procedurally generated crew of hundreds as they embark on a dangerous mission to discover the source of an anomalous signal emanating from deep space.
You will need to optimize crew assignments and maximize the performance of your ship, always with the specter of dangerous, spontaneous events looming over you. You will need to contend with ship-board fires, biological contagions, and a supernatural terror that only grows as you get nearer to your goal.
As the casualties mount and your crew members start to crack under the pressure, you'll need to figure out how to keep the ship going with whom you have left. Sometimes that means spotting the crew members who can grow and improve, and sometimes that will mean taking a risk that someone on the edge can hold out just a little longer.
Key Features
The Living Vessel - Command a dynamically generated crew of hundreds, each with their own jobs, habits, routines, strengths and weaknesses!
A Galaxy of Horrors - Space exploration is dangerous enough. Throw in madness, monstrosities and eldritch horrors, and you have a gauntlet of terror!
Warm and Fuzzy Becomes Dark and Spooky - Cute pixel art warms anyone’s heart…until they see the adorable members of the crew blown up, dragged into vents, or sucked out of airlocks!
A Different Adventure Every Time - In the grand tradition of roguelikes, every run will feature different crew members and different sequences of events.
The Story
In the distant future, humankind has explored the galaxy. Whether by vessel or probe, every celestial body has been cataloged and we have found...nothing. The Milky Way is a desolate, lonely, lifeless void. The age of discovery is over, as is the dream of finding a new Eden somewhere in the cosmos. We are alone. Utterly alone.
Or rather, we were.
Four years ago, a long dormant probe at the edge of the Legasov Nebula suddenly re-activated, relaying an anomalous signal from a hitherto empty region of space. The signal, a strange pulse, proved ineffable - all mathematical and neurolinguistic attempts to decipher it failed.
The governments of Earth decided that the only course of action was to revive the long-lost art of exploration and dispatch a vessel to discover the source of the pulse. The brightest scientific minds spent the intervening years constructing the most advanced starship ever created, sparing no expense to put it at the very frontier of spectroscopy, nanoforging, and fold-drive technology. To assist the crew in a mission of this import, the ship builders installed the latest AI quantum core, dubbed SNPAI, at the heart of the ship.
To crew this singular vessel, the chairs of the expedition filled the various roles of the ship, from officers on down to janitorial, with the best candidates they could find, and provided them with the best training and equipment available.
They would be humanity's first explorers in centuries, able to overcome any obstacle their journey put in front of them. Or so they hoped. They set out looking for answers. What they will find will go beyond anything they could fathom.
Gameplay
What The Stars Forgot is a horror-based management sim. You play the role of SNPAI (Sentient Neuromonitoring Partner AI), this ship's onboard AI supercomputer. The crew can handle their day-to-day responsibilities, so your job is to help them handle the events that occur during the course of the adventure. That could mean changing crew member assignments to make the best use of their individual skill sets, figuring our how to best balance the workload as the casualties mount, and how to respond to various emergencies that will crop up during the course of your adventure.
One moment you may need to dispatch engineers to put out a shipboard fire, and in the next you'll need to quarantine individuals who have been infected with a dangerous virus and prioritize the development of a vaccine.
A large part of your responsibilities will be to manage the crew's performance. Some crew members will have hidden talents that will suit them for a new role. Others may be complete novices at a particular job but have a high potential for growth if you let them build experience. You will have to balance what assignments are optimal now, versus which could unlock advantages over time.
And the wrong person on the wrong assignment can be catastrophic.
You will also need to pay attention to the moods of the crew members. The crew will provide clues, in the form of their words and deeds, about how they are feeling. Do they feel confident in their current assignment? Are they stressed out? Planning a mutiny? Suffering a complete break with reality? Left unchecked, crew member's stress can drive them to drink too much, stop performing their duties, or even start a dangerous, eldritch-worshipping cult.