My favourite type of video game can be summarised as “something has gone wrong in space”. Whether it’s a shooter, immersive sim, strategy game, or kart racer, I’m always up for a game that’s about dealing with a horrible problem in the most hostile environment of them all.
And wow, does Dandelion Void understand the meaning of the word “horrible”. The pitch is you’re trapped aboard a derelict generation ship that has, in the unknown expanse of time since your ship departed Earth in the late 20th century, been completely overgrown by extraterrestrial rainforest. Unlike most games set in abandoned spaceships, this jungle thrums and thrives with new life. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound too bad, until you discover that life is rabidly hostile toward anything with fewer than seven legs.
To survive among this drifting wilderness, you’ll need to explore the ship and scavenge for useful items, cutting through the jungle and ripping up its roots to create a safe area in which to build your base. Venturing deeper into the ship will mean finding ways to open gigantic bulkhead doors. But you won’t know exactly where these doors will lead. They could reveal rooms filled with bountiful resources. Or they could expose you directly to the hard vacuum of space.
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In presentation and play, Dandelion Void looks and sounds a lot like Project Zomboid, which is not surprising considering the developers, Manzanita Interactive, assembled from the modding community of The Indie Stone’s phenomenally successful isometric survival game. There are plenty of setting specific flourishes to the basic survival loop, though, such as having to find and repair different kinds of spacesuit to deal with airless rooms or corridors crackling with radiation.
It’s a great premise, and a recently released trailer (viewable above) sells it brilliantly. One devilish twist is that the, uh, creatures that prowl this interstellar rainforest grow around the bones of the ship’s long-deceased crew, resulting in some thoroughly unpleasant monster designs. This is put to excellent effect in the middle of the trailer too, though I’ll say no more about that.
There’s no release date for Dandelion Void yet, but according to the accompanying Steam post for the trailer, the game’s been in development for a couple of years already. In any case, you can find out more about Dandelion Void on its Steam page.
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