The Great Empty is a space exploration game, searching for creatures while you traverse a planet in simplified fashion, gather materials and view random events featuring stunning artwork. Each sound is spot on, and together with the music and art it creates a wonderfully atmospheric game.

I think the core of this game is the awe before life in all its strange unknown shapes and forms in space, and this is definitely what describes it well. The music is for gentle grandeur, and the cutscenes with space and creatures add well into it. Dialogue, or more monologue, is kept to an honest search in line with the protagonist, a biologist's, passion.
That being the enormous. Your main goal is to find huge creatures which you see and observe, and also gather entries for in your encyclopedia on your ship.
And that is about it of the story. It apparantly is also something that will be explored more beyond the demo. There are a few typos here and there, but nothing outstanding.

Gameplay-wise, it is a strange mix of lovely artwork showing this discovery, and very minimized exploration possibilities. The creator specifically asked for detailed input on what to possibly add to the usual gameplay, and I will try to make it a point.

So the game's art is gorgeous - the music is, too. It may possibly be SnowOwl's experience with the horror genre showing through, but every sound-effect and piece of music is spot-on. From the robot-buzzing to menu and flight sound, they all suit the game incredibly well, add to the atmosphere and are a joy on the ears.
It is a great factor in what carries the game, as it relies heavily on creating a curious atmosphere of fascination and wonder.
It nails it.


I'm not even much a sci-fi fan myself .. but .. I love this!

The gameplay then is separated into two areas - the first is preparation in your ship. You can buy upgrades there with materials you gathered, send yourself a congratulatory message (may I add that I love this optional feature, be it as a sarcastic joke or as a little happy something!), or see the weather report. You can also view the details you gathered on previously seen creatures, with habitat, behaviour and size-guide.
Upgrades affect which planets you can actually access in the first place, and also give you a slight boost in your exploration ability outside the ship. Air-tanks being the most important upgrade as you can stay outside longer.

The second is the exploration outside the ship - you have no direct exploration, instead, you traverse a minimap and have certain event icons (like caves, or forests/plains) to interact with. Whether these events be good or bad is dependant on a random factor in most cases. Interacting with them makes a little bit of flavour text appear and time will pass - you may find resources, animal/plant findings, or have a negative experience draining your survivability.
Outside your ship you have only so many steps you can take before you run out of air, and your morale needs to be kept high by not having horrible experiences outside. Basically - you stumble into too many near-death experiences, you die. You walk around too much - you die.

The idea in itself is simple and nice - however there are a number of limitations and flaws with it. First, you need to keep in mind that you have to interact with a number of events before you can return to your ship. You need to wait out 5 periods of time before you can return, which is both illogical, and strange. If you get unlucky in your explorations and find no event icons you are left to die as air runs out very very quickly.
Morale is highly dependant on the area you traverse - there are only a number of planets available yet, and I found only the desert-storm one to be possibly highly detrimental to your morale (and yet you still need to continue interacting with events, lest you want to be stranded), and morale a non-issue for the rest.

I mentioned you may gather resources to buy upgrades with - for these you need a robot each, you can upgrade them, too. There are 5 to be used at once, however, for the scope the game has, you will never run out of robots because the air is always quicker. Which is why in planning, there is no consideration for them, nor is there anytime else. You do not see which event triggers a resource vs. anything else, either.

With the details out of the way - the maps are very very small. What it comes down to is that you traverse every planet the exact same way. You search for event spots (with upgrade you should see a third of the map starting out). You use all event spots without taking unnecessary steps, return to your ship. Done.


This is with all light-radius upgrades of the ship - once you have them, there is only so much dark space to explore. It does not extend to anywhere.

I find it very hard to vary it up the way it is now, as it is very limited in how you can explore. You NEED to use events, and they are randomized in their effect anyway, so avoiding them should bad stuff happen and you may need to keep morale is not an option. You NEED to use all you can because you run out of air quickly. There is not even much leeway in taking your steps.
The map layout is the same every time, and becomes redundant quickly. There also is a dead space on the bottom right under the minimap, as you cannot move anywhere from it, and end up inevitably wasting steps and precious air, compared to going to another direction.

There are a number of ways you could change this up, with varying degrees of difficult implementation.
One method would be to increase the interactivity of "events" themselves - you could hear a noise in a cave and have to decide whether to go after its source. If low on morale, you may want to play it safe. If not, you may take the risk and either get a reward or a punishment. This allows for more planning and choice even without changing anything of the layout and would then give more leeway to stronger penalties as you then have a way to avoid certain death even when low. Many a time, at least. There should always be a random chance.

It also allows for more flavour text in general - I know the creator went for a semi-realistic approach, with living organisms adjusting to the planet's structure.
It would also be possible to make it more interesting by implementing more of these environmental facts and smaller organisms. You could skip pictures (or not) for these organisms and instead have a secondary compendium for them sorted by planet. These could be short and add value to exploring the same planet multiple times as you get more flavour and more pieces of information on the planet itself. Either described when encountering them, or back in your home.

The way it is is very smooth and responsive, but because of that also too simple for what you are using. However, the combination of fast-draining air and very compact map that makes it very hard to keep track of how far you can actually travel. I found it hard to guess how far exactly I can go, and being safe is always better than being sorry.

To vary it up with changes could for example be done by adjusting the light-radius to certain planets - having a smaller sight radius will certainly pose a threat and make it more difficult, for one.
There could be monster flocks moving around the planet. They would be at a slower speed than you, but still important to take into consideration as the space to walk is seemingly small. (or possible to observe if you manage to walk alongside them without them moving to you .. sounds like too much of a gamble to me tho)

On-map the general layout could be varied a little bit by having chasms, or other small patches of fields affecting your stats (say, draining your morale one or two per step over frozen ice sheets), making you want to avoid them under certain circumstances. And thus making you pay attention to your stats and the environment and react differently according to that.
Small patches of impassable terrain also means you cannot use the one exact movement pattern. There is no need to introduce all of these, so long as you are told to pay attention to different colored or whatever tiles in the tutorial once. It is fairly easy to figure out if you know they are something to watch out for.
It also appears to me that most event-places are set and reappear in the same locations. Varying these up will also require you to go exploring into different directions.

I find it hard to say if removing or lowering the time-counter or increasing the air-supplies (which are supposedly able to upgrade further later on anyway?) would be a good idea as of now, as it needs to be adjusted. I do feel air is a little tight. I also think that lowering the time-counter (not necessarily for monster to appear) for returning would open up more possibilities.

What to do with the robots I have few solid suggestions for, either, sadly.
You could possible send them one or two out on their own to give you vision of a small area without having to explore it yourself (if it's empty), rendering them unusable for harvesting.
You could make a tradeoff in "gear" as well, heading out with either slightly more air, or more robots to use, as both would add weight. But that is about all I can think of off the top of my head.

All that said and nitpicked on - I found the minimalistic gameplay well-thought out and highly enjoyable. As it is, it makes for a more of a rinse-and-repeat experience, needing to take little into consideration (bare a careful stepcount). It works for exploring the different sceneries you see in pictures, and farming material, but it is more a means to procceed with a little bit of flavour in pictures. (different events show different sceneries on different planets)

I was pleasantly surprised and awed by this game, and I suggest giving this a try, even just to see the beautiful landscape and leave with that view in mind.
I hope it can be transformed into something where the gameplay is as captivating as the environment, but I find it is a unique and solidly built experience already.