While it is very reminiscent of the brilliant Terrarium, you can always escape the treacherous night times by warping back to your spaceship. You'll also need to run from or fight local wildlife, find food and build a shelter to keep yourself safe and warm during cold nights. Cut down wood, mine ore, build tools to help you cut down wood and mine ore faster, repeat. Once you warp to the planet's surface, Starbound's immediate structure will look familiar to anyone who's played a crafting-based sandbox game in the last five years. Whichever race you choose, the game begins with your character alone on a spaceship, stranded with minimal tools and floating above an unexplored planet. Starbound begins with choosing a race, with options ranging from hyper-intelligent apes to self-aware robots. Yes, you will upgrade yourself in various ways, but if you tire of digging for the for elusive titanium ore you can instead spend hours meticulously decorating your starship with assorted furniture and sundries.
What begins as a quest to save the universe from an ancient evil quickly devolves into a fun and charming rabbit hole of tasks and to-do lists. You will travel through the galaxy with a troupe consisting of a pig, a couple of aliens and two heavily armed penguins. Starbound is a terrific sci-fi 2D romp through the unusual and absurd.