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Spotlight on Greenlight: Infinite Pixels

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Welcome once again to PCGamesN’s Spotlight on Greenlight, our regular Saturday feature where we look at the best and the most interesting Greenlight games that are hoping to make their way onto Steam. We’ve already looked at dozens of other titles in weeks past, so do take a look at our back catalogue.

Space games are back in fashion. The setting has eked out a survival for the past few years on 4X games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Sword of the Stars, or space mission simulators Kerbal Space Program and Lunar Flight but this past year has seen a swathe of new projects, each reaching further than the last.

Infinite Pixels joins their number, a voxel-based space exploration game that limits your scope by requiring you keep your astronauts fed, watered, and oxygenated.

Starting out in the vast sandbox of space, Infinite Pixels dumps you in a randomly generated universe in nothing but a space suit, leaving you to mine nearby asteroids for resources to build food plants, hydration centres, and sleeping quarters.

In its current form, with only the barest of planned features implemented, Infinite Pixels may not seem the most exciting of games. You mine rocks, build a couple of structures on a planet, and repeat the process on another chunk of rock. However, the survival aspect is what is what’s most intriguing and could have the largest ramifications on play.

If you’re in a constant struggle to feed and water your astronauts (oxygen is yet to be implemented but it is on the list of survival requirements to be added to the game) then this will drive your play. You won’t be in a position to explore the great unknown until you can store the rations to keep you alive in your travels. For instance, while you might be able to see a planet in the distance before you can reach it you will have to make shorter trips, building staging platforms out in space, allowing you to make the great distance through a chain of shorter journeys. Or, another possibility is that you launch yourself at it in a rocket and pray there’s enough on the new planet to sustain you for a return journey.

Kerbal Space Program’s joy comes from the self-made missions (and the explosions). Before you can get to the Mun you must build a rocket that can leave your home planet’s atmosphere, then one which can reach the Mun, then one which can return, one that can land, and so on. Hints of that element of iterative exploration and achievement can be found in Infinite Pixels.

Though, in Infinite Pixels, you can do it all in co-op:

Normally the games that we cover in Spotlight are finished and needing a home on Steam or, at least, quite far along in development. At that point we can better gauge the trajectory of a game, what design direction they’re going to take the project in. Infinite Pixels is clearly in the early stages of development but it’s also doing something that fills a hole. While similar to a lot of other games about we don’t have a first-person procedurally generated space survival exploration game.

If you want to see Infinite Pixels find its way onto Steam, or even just as a way to tell the developers to keep going, then give it the thumbs up on Greenlight. Also, you could support the game’s funding drive over on Indiegogo.