Today I feel a little bleak. I don't know. I lost too much time in front of pc and an hour of play became two, then three... Then raise your wrist and the smartwatch marks dinner time and you haven’t even thought about what to eat yet. I look up at the ceiling, my spider friend watches me. I hold my arm to him in a closed fist and excl. “Dannato Space Haven! I never wanted to play you."
Welcome to Habbibi space
Developed by the white-blue team of Bugbyte (no, not because I know daa Lazio, but why so Finnish... present? Sauna, Sisu, Perkele...), Space Haven borrows the Oxygen Not Included management paranoia and FTL claustrophobia, hang them in a dress at Habbo and throw them towards the infinite and beyond. The result is one of the most fascinating space simulators I have ever played in recent years.
The premise is simple: the Earth went to rolls and a handful of survivors wanders among the stars in search of a new house. In practice, however, each game is a constant oscillation between saints who come down because you do not have enough water, sacred discensions cause electricity and divine falls because your crew does not take enough vitamins.
Moment, moment, moment! Let’s start with the monopoly “via”.
Feeling a captain Kirk in a sandbox
At the first start, Space Haven welcomes us with a rather spartan menu, without frills. The first thing you want to do will be switching from the tutorial, because you will soon find out that There are so many things to learn that seems a good idea to try to understand at least how to districate between all systems. Once you take your hand, you can start with one of the game modes, which seem first-attended modes Sandbox.
In fact the game has a non-so-che retrogusto of other titles of this genre to which I played, but to differ here there is one This the main line as a conductor and a myriad of optional secondary that give strength to that hypothesis. As you progress in history you will be object of a sort of second tutorial that will lead you to build the ship (or ships) isometric square for isometric square.
The visual is... good, guessed! Isometrica and graphics of habbiana memory and in the midst of nothing of space you will have to throw down an area that will define your hull, which will have to be subsequently accompanied and furnished with a series of things ranging from futuristic propulsion beds and oxygen generators to algae dispensers (hmmm, what goodness!). Everything, including walls, costs a certain amount of blocks. Yes, blocks, exact, Minecraft style. Instead of having a HUD in which there are the usual “gold, wood, stone...”, here you will have a variety of blocks, each of which will serve for a part of what you want to place on your ship.
The industry that goes from scrap remedied around the galaxy and technoblock, however, is a complicated figure and passes from the printed circuit that passes from the silicon, which passes from the raw mineral, that to the market my father bought. Is there an incredible chain, very tough to manage and set up with a set of rules appropriate to avoid swallowing the logistics and not having the possibility to create what you need... And speaking of logistics there are an infinite amount of parameters to be set: from the work shift (day or night, to say... even if in space I am not sure how you distinguano) to the priority of the various tasks (before bringing things to maintenance? First go to extract minerals on asteroids or recycle scrap found on the wrecks of the destroyed ships? ).
Building a ship does not simply mean placing rooms and machinery. It means creating an ecosystem. Oxygen must circulate, heat must be controlled, energy must arrive where it is needed. A door left open at the wrong time can turn a corridor into a mortuary room. A flares Solar can trigger short circuits, so fires, so a chain of events worthy of a particularly sadistic episode of Star Trek.
...And in all this if you don’t eat the crew decently, if you stress it with constant work or... ahem... if you screw it up, you will have to fight even against the enemies of balanced psyche.
Panta rei
You're in an industry, you're done exploring the wrecks, you sent your team to clean up aliens or rebel robots... and now? And now you are forced to move towards the next sector because you have finished water, or minerals, or l’energium... And once you explore a whole solar system, you will have to take a pill against the pain of interstellmare and jump into hyperspace to reach the next system and that the gods will send you good on what you will find there. Pirates? Slaves? Or just merchants? Oh, no, it's just a military fleet. A moment, what does it mean “we would like to inspect the ship”? You'll even have to hide the smuggling.
The universe moves, the other ships travel, they meet you, they attack you, trade with you, you can sell them slaves, you can collect the sizes of prisoners... In short, the possibilities are really numerous.
But it is not over here: Space Haven excels in transforming numbers, statistics and productive routines into stories that seem to belong to a TV series of science fiction never turned, with a Loire that is not bad and immerses you even more than you do that background music: ethereal and never tiring.
Asteroids on the hull
After years of Early Access, version 1.0 has finally come up Steam (but be careful! BugByte has also published for Mac and Linux, but in the current state (end of May 2026) the interface continues to have more than a few edges. Pass the impossibility of turning the screen (sometimes the selection of a character is made impossible by objects and icons in over impression), but there were really many times when I crooked my nose.
Some mechanics require a significant dose of patience and the learning curve can resemble a vertical wall of oiled glass. Especially if you consider that the tutorials (both initial and during the game do NOT explain some of the mechanics in their completeness).
But there's something magnetic. in the way the game manages to get you attached to a metal box that floats in nothing and the lost souls that live it and constantly fight against emergencies. Every new technology sought seems to be a conquest. Every hyperspace jump a bet. Each wreck found a promise of wealth or a potential catastrophe.
Space Haven is not a game for everyone. It takes time, attention and psychological readiness to accept that the cup of the toilet that burns its sponent can destroy the work of your last twenty hours of play, but for those who love management science fiction, that made of thousand details and continuous emergencies, Space Haven is a little wonder.
About the Author
Biography
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