The Curiosity mission sparked a new wave of interest in space. NASA got extra funding and developers rushed to create games dedicated to space exploration. Extrasolar by Lazy 8 Studios, creators of the wonderful puzzle game Cogs, is one such game.
You’ll get to master the role of an eXoplanetary Research Institute (XRI) employee driving a rover on a distant planet outside the solar system. Unlike Take On Mars, where you steer the rover by hand, here you only have to route the rover and process the captured photos.
Extrasolar is a browser-based turn-based game and it is really a research institute simulator. You will receive tasks by internal mail, send photos with objects marked on them worthy of attention to other employees, choose the route of the research vehicle. The authors weren’t lazy and even created the Exoleaks site, where they collect information about XRI and the site of the institute itself, where your virtual colleagues keep their blogs and share the results of the research. All this, cryptic hints in correspondence, photos of alien landscapes, the study of new life forms – looks very intriguing.
In the free version, you can move the rover and take one photo every four hours. In the paid version, for which you have to pay $ 9.5 – once an hour, plus as a bonus you get unlimited ability to take panoramic and infrared pictures. The game version with all future add-ons costs $25. We recommend at least trying the free version, which perfectly captures the spirit of space exploration.