Endless Sky Haul cargo, chase the galaxy

Your first ship is, by the store's own admission, relatively wimpy. That is the point. Haul cargo, carry passengers, escort convoys, hunt bounties, mine asteroids, or plunder and capture enemy ships, and every credit goes back into the hull. Outfitting a new ship with better engines, weapons and hardware is a quiet pleasure in itself, and the fleet you end up with is entirely your call: one heavily customized flagship or a small armada of freighters and warships. The early game is a slow build, and pirates can end a bad takeoff quickly, but once the money starts snowballing, upgrading stops being a grind and becomes the game.

The main story drops you into a 31st century civil war, and you can take sides or ignore it completely and just trade your way across the stars. The main line runs about 8 to 16 hours, with over a hundred hours of other storylines, big and small, scattered across hundreds of systems. The writing is strong, and the game leans on showing rather than telling: jump into a system where something genuinely strange is happening, a black hole among them, and the game will not stop to explain it. That restraint is a highlight. One honest caveat: some missions are easy to miss or trigger, so a wrong answer at the wrong moment can quietly close a storyline.