Yet again, friends, I am escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. They have need of journalists up there, no matter what that dafty Musk might prefer. Or so I understand from Space News Network – a No Man’s Sky-esque exploration game in which you play a starpilot reporter, rocketing between strange new worlds in search of the next scoop. You’ll brave pirate blockades, descend through the atmosphere and tangle with unidentified fauna, all in the name of such Pulitzer Prize-baiting bulletins as “Cisiom: it’s glowy, it’s blue. Is it safe to touch?”

There’s a work-in-progress build on Itch.io, and I’ll be downloading shortly. I expect I’ll find it pathetically easy. I may not know my way around an Apollo lander, but you’d best believe I’m a master of mangling the truth into profitable copy. Here’s an overview video from developer GeekZebra.

In Space News Network, you’ll acquire news in two broad ways. You can zip around searching for oddities on planets and in the vacuum of space itself, which could take a while, or you can harass informants for leads and, later, juicy quotes. Each informant has a distinct personality and profession, befitting the kind of sexy journalism they will facilitate. What’s my headline, Huge Hands Gasmask Man?

…OK then. Seems being a Space Journalist doesn’t wholly exempt you from having to run the occasional bog-standard Space Errand. Fine, Huge Hands Gasmask Man, I’ll go mine some asteroids for you. But in return, I expect you to spill enough tea to flood the Death Star. I want the hot goss on that Cisiom stuff.

Once you’ve amassed the materials, you’ll publish your stories by way of a simplified InDesign tool, with players dragging text and pictures onto a template. There’s the rudiments of an in-game reader marketplace, with subscribers demanding harder and harder reporting over time.

It’s hard to get a sense of how much actual editorial control you’ll have, from the video: are these just canned stories, unlocked by ticking the right quest boxes, or do we get a choice of angles or biases? Do we get to decide how much research we put in? Can I actively defame Huge Hands Gasmask Man, and can I murder his lawyers with my mining laser when they show up demanding a retraction?

It doesn’t look as complex as, say, News Tower, and I do find myself immediately wishing for a multiplayer element – I want to be able to send my news reports to actual humans. I think that would make a wonderful addition to most space sandbox games, really. Another parallel that comes to mind is Noctis, the crystaline wonder from 2000 in which players document planets in a central database. Anyway, the full version of Space News Network is out… as and when.