Chris InglisThe recent single player playtest for StarRupture, the upcoming first-person open world sci-fi survival game from Creepy Jar the creators of Green Hell, has given gamers a first real taste of the game’s core mechanics. While the game is designed with a co-op experience in mind, this test was a crucial opportunity for developer Creepy Jar to fine-tune the solo experience.
There is an initial character selection screen with four options, however we are limited to just choosing the scientist, which is fine for a playtest like this. Right from the start, the game presents a beautiful but menacing alien world, Arcadia-7. The visuals, powered by Unreal Engine 5, are often striking, and the world feels lush and mysterious, even when the developers have said these are placeholder visuals, which bodes well for future updates during the early access period, which they say will last around a year. This playtest focused on the early hours of the game, introducing players to the core loop of base-building, automation, survival and exploration.
The basics of factory automation felt satisfying and easy to understand, giving a glimpse of the complex industrial systems players will be able to create in the full game. There’s a good trickle of progression, with players unlocking new technologies and buildings as they learn how to mine resources, send them off to other corporations, and smelt ore into blocks. If you make a mistake when building, you can easily break down that building or object by pressing F, clicking on the object and you get the full resources back to try again.
As expected from a game by the Green Hell team, survival elements are a key part of the experience, with calories and hydration management being crucial. You can find plants around the place that you can eat and drink and can analyse them for data points which are used to unlock other technologies. Once you get automation up and running, the guided tutorial concludes, and you are free to roam and continue limited resource collection and base building.
So far I had no experienced any combat, nor did I see any wildlife in the distance. What I did see in the distance was intriguing, with massive derelict structures and what I learned were beacons that required a particular technology to be unlocked. At the base of one of these beacons was a dead corpse, and looting it gave me items I had not seen before. I looked around further and could see caves and other structures that piqued my interest.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing performance-wise, though. Granted my machine is starting to age and I only have a RTX3080 Super GPU which meant I was averaging between 40-60fps. When I first got into the game, it was quite stutter but once I had looked around in all directions, it smoothed out. Then when I stepped out of the landing ship and started exploring, each new vista lagged a little until I had seen it all, and then it ran smoothly, which is to be expected for an early access game.
Despite being in early access, the StarRupture single-player test established a strong foundation for a sci-fi survival and base-building game. The world of Arcadia-7 is beautiful and intriguing, and the core gameplay loop is already a lot of fun. While there are some technical issues to be ironed out, the potential is there for StarRupture to be an easy recommend for fans of the genre when it launches in Early Access this fall in the US.
These first impressions are thanks to keys for the playtest provided by Evolve PR and StarRupture is set to release in the coming months in 2025 on Steam.
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