Duskers is getting a ship-building sequel years after the sci-fi roguelike scared us to bits

The creators of sci-fi corridor explorer Duskers are making a “spiritual successor” to the 2016 space game. The studio revealed their plans in a video showing three prototypes they’re currently working on. The working title for this one is “Humanity 2.0” and it’ll see you carving up derelict ships to build your own vessel and sometimes defending that ship from pirates trying to take it over. It sounds like you’ll still be the sweaty cybermaster of a bunch of glitchy drones, who now might suffer “fun personality quirks” when you install upgrades, “like not wanting to go down narrow corridors because it’s now claustrophobic”.

Sad, busted-ass space robots just trying to get by? Yes, I’m interested.

“What can I say? I still love Duskers,” says Tim Keenan, co-founder of Misfits Attic, in the video that shows off what the studio has been up to, including two other game prototypes.

The footage for Humanity 2.0 shows the player cutting up and rearranging the rooms of a spaceship using the green retro interface familiar to players of the first game. The player types “slice” as a command to chop up parts of the vessel, for example. But that’s really all we see that seems significantly different so far. The rest of the video talks of pirates and scrap-hunting in deep space. But it seems too early in development to show any of that yet.

Keenan wants the game to go beyond mere survival though, to include themes of “sacrificing to save the survivors of this bleak future, and rebooting humanity”. But he also reassures viewers that the tone will still be pretty grim. “It’s just a ray of hope, not a sunrise,” he says. “The game will still be dark.”

Like I say, this is not the only thing the studio is working on. Misfits Attic have three projects in the pipeline. The others include a fantasy-themed strategy game currently titled “Scheme”, which sees you “starting as a lowborn and rising to power while outwitting and backstabbing some very powerful highborns”. It’s described as “Crusader Kings lite”, in which you never have any armies yourself, but need to use Game Of Thrones style manipulation to convince other factions to war with one another.

The third game is a tactical chessy roguelike temporarily known as “Magic Wizard Chess” but in which something weird is going on behind the wibbling CRT scanlines. “While you’re playing you may be psychologically evaluated for an unknown reason,” says Keenan, “but don’t worry about that.”

Duskers remains one of the best hacking games you can play today. It gives you the feeling of being a lost and lonely engineer hired by a big ugly company from the Alien movies, except all you have are unreliable drone pals and shaky typing hands hovering over your command-line interface. It would be cool to see a follow-up some day, but with three games in the assembly line, it might be a while until those bay doors open.