Free to playIs Space Station: Beyond worth it?
Space Station: Beyond is worth it if…
- you like multiplayer rounds where the story comes from the players, not a script
- you enjoy jobs that are real jobs, until they collapse into chaos
- you want a game with a dark sense of humor and no respect for corporate safety
- you like permadeath stakes, where a bad round ends your character for good
- you would rather sabotage the station than fix it, at least some of the time
Screenshots
A job for every kind of troublemaker
You pick a profession and then actually do it. Engineers keep the hull and the air supply intact, or burn thousands of dollars of materials building a ship for joyrides. Scientists poke at anomalies and turn them into new, more exciting anomalies. Doctors keep the crew alive, Security arrests whoever deserves it, cargo rams the delivery shuttle into the station and sells everything not nailed down. Chefs and bartenders feed a crew that is one bad meal away from a fistfight. And the Clown is there too, for some reason. Every job is playable straight from the start, and every job can ruin someone else's shift.
Someone on board wants the station gone
Not everyone clocks in to work. Each round hides threats among the crew: Nuclear Operatives sneaking in to steal the disk and detonate a nuke, Traitors working through secret goals without getting caught, Thieves with sticky fingers, Cultists converting the crew before summoning their god to eat the stars, and Zombies, who mostly want brains. Your job is to stop them, or to be one of them and make sure the sabotage is at least very funny when it lands. You never know who is who, which is why trusting the guy in the maintenance tunnels is a decision with consequences.
The welcome brochure has been tampered with
Nanotrasen, your employer, promises your safety and well-being and insists you are family. The corporate onboarding video keeps getting interrupted by Syndicate attack shuttles, announcements about a nuclear device in the armory, and instructions to ensure no survivors. That dry, dark comedy runs through everything: the jobs read like HR documents, the threats read like HR documents, and the gap between the two is where the jokes live. It is a grim little universe played entirely for laughs, and the pixel art and top-down view give it the look of a classic that never existed.
Bring friends, or bring enemies
This is a multiplayer station, and it works best with people to share it with. Crew up and keep the place running together, argue with Security over a wrongful conviction, or follow the Clown around all shift heckling him. When the round hides a traitor in your group, the co-op turns on itself: the friend fixing the engine might be the one who broke it. And if you would rather settle it directly, there is PvP for facing off and PvE for fighting the station's problems side by side. Either way, someone is going to blame the Clown, and the Clown will deserve it.
