Beyond These Stars is a city-building game where players establish and expand a settlement on the back of a giant living space whale named Kiwa, managing resources, pollution, and population while exploring space and uncovering the whale’s mysterious past. Featuring deep environmental strategy, terraforming, and advanced industries, the game combines resource management with space exploration in a visually unique and narratively rich setting, releasing on October 16th.
Beyond These Stars is a unique city-building game set on the back of a giant, living space whale named Kiwa. Players begin by establishing a settlement on the whale’s back after their civilization, having survived underground from destructive space creatures, discovers this peaceful behemoth. The game features a story mode, sandbox, and scenarios, with gameplay revolving around managing resources like wood, stone, iron, and water, while expanding the population and infrastructure on the whale’s vast surface. Players must strategically place buildings such as water pumps, farms, mines, and housing, while balancing worker assignments and happiness.
Resource management is central to the gameplay, with an emphasis on adjacency bonuses that affect production and happiness. Players unlock technologies progressively, enabling the construction of more advanced buildings like burner generators, ore smelters, tool smiths, and eventually complex structures such as schools, cleaners, and metal smelters. Pollution management is a critical aspect, as industrial activities produce soot and toxic waste that can harm the whale and hinder building operations. The game encourages careful planning to mitigate pollution through cleaners and planting trees, adding a layer of environmental strategy.
A major gameplay feature is the whale’s ability to travel through space via FTL (faster-than-light) travel, allowing players to explore new sectors and resources. Communication with Kiwa is established through an alien device called the strange transmitter, unfolding a narrative involving the whale’s memory loss and the player’s struggle to survive far from their home planet. Players can build scout spaceships to investigate alien artifacts and expand their influence across the galaxy, adding a space exploration element to the city-building mechanics.
The game also introduces terraforming mechanics through the landscaper building, enabling players to modify the whale’s terrain to expand their breathable atmosphere and access new resources like copper. Population growth is managed through schools and housing upgrades, with denser living arrangements unlocking more workers but requiring careful resource and happiness management. Advanced industries such as chemical factories and electronics plants become available, further complicating the production chains and pollution control, while also unlocking new technologies and buildings.
Overall, Beyond These Stars offers an engaging blend of city-building, resource management, environmental strategy, and space exploration, all set against the imaginative backdrop of a living space whale. The game’s detailed systems and narrative depth provide a rich experience beyond its quirky premise. While some challenges like soot production can be frustrating, the game encourages experimentation and thoughtful planning. Set for release on October 16th, it promises a fresh take on the genre with a visually stunning and thematically unique world.