- August 15, 2023
- Universal Happymaker
Astronaut: The Best
Platforms
About
"Astronaut: The Best" is a procedurally generated space-themed game where you navigate episodic storylines and make crucial decisions. Your arsenal includes training, sycophantic groveling, lying, and witchcraft as you aim to make history or risk ending up dead in a ditch. The game features five missions, hundreds of decisions, and thousands of procedurally generated astronauts, each with their unique personalities and traits, ensuring no two plays are the same.










- The game features great writing, art, and music, providing a unique and engaging experience with a humorous and chaotic atmosphere.
- It offers a fun blend of management sim and roguelike elements, allowing for inventive scenarios and replayability with absurd outcomes.
- Players appreciate the game's ability to make failure enjoyable, with each playthrough resulting in hilarious and memorable stories.
- The core gameplay loop can feel repetitive, with many missions having similar dialogue and mechanics that may lead to frustration.
- Some players find the luck-based mechanics and grindy stat training to be a nuisance, detracting from the overall enjoyment.
- The art style and humor may not appeal to everyone, making it a game that is best experienced through gameplay videos before purchasing.
story
36 mentions Positive Neutral NegativeThe game's story is primarily structured as a visual novel with preset, branching narratives, leading to a repetitive experience that diminishes replay value due to similar dialogue across missions. However, it compensates with humorous writing and absurd scenarios that create unique, personalized stories for each player, making it enjoyable for unwinding and sharing wild experiences. While the randomness of events adds a layer of challenge and strategy, the overall narrative can feel stagnant, as many players find themselves re-reading lengthy text from previous attempts.
“The story contains humorous dialogue with witty character remarks and interactions, and has quite a few choices which provide opportunities for multiple playthroughs.”
“The writing is so genuinely funny, and the things that can happen as a result of succeeding or failing are so absurd, that I just fully accepted each weird, wonderful playthrough as my own story.”
“Of the five missions, #3 was my favorite (spacewolves!), but as you go on, there's some pretty cool world-building that gets layered into the personalized procedural goodness.”
“I would say it's more of a visual novel with preset, branching narratives than a roguelike with a procedural story that is advertised as being very different every time you play.”
“It's very samey, and there's actually not much of a reason to replay missions because so much of the dialogue and story is the same every time.”
“It feels like a punishment to have to reread all the same long paragraphs of text you've seen before just because you failed previously, clicking nonstop to gather all the information you just gathered before in some of the mission types where you have to investigate.”