I do love a bit of space exploration in games, there’s something quite beautiful about the infinite openness, alongside having a terrifying primal fear quality. The peacefulness is often the important thing for me though, and the upcoming cargo delivery sim Space Hauler looks like it will, uh, deliver on that front.
Space Hauler is, perhaps quite dauntingly, a full scale, 1:1 recreation of the Saturnian system, specifically focusing on its largest moon Titan. As far as I can tell, that means your ship is accurate to what it would be in real life, and Saturn and its moons are proportionate to their real-world counterparts too – now half measures to be found here. You play as a pilot-for-hire, where you have to bring cargo between surface bases, remote outposts, and satellites. It may even be that you have to meet up with another, stranded ship to give them some fuel.
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There’s a heavy emphasis on simulation here, notably in the flight physics, which differ depending on whether you’re in space or on one of the moons. But it goes deeper than that. Every single button, dial, meter, switch, watchamacallit in your spaceship’s cockpit is fully functional and serves a specific purpose. This surely will disrupt some aspect of the peacefulness, but given how big space is, I’m sure you can leisurely inspect all of the doohickeys without much cause for concern.
For those that like to enter the VR zone, there’s optional support for that too. And those with a HOTAS or flight stick can get more deeply stuck in too. Right now there’s no exact release date for Space Hauler outside of sometime in 2027, but whenever it does launch it will do so in early access. You can wishlist it on Steam in the meantime.
