A stranded astronaut meets Voyager 1 in a free Steam game

The premise of Control, I’m Not Coming Back fits in a sentence: an accident sets a space cadet adrift, and the hour that follows becomes a conversation with Voyager 1. Desborde Games released it free on Steam on May 29—Windows first, macOS since—and the response has been wildly out of proportion to the price. As of this writing it sits at Overwhelmingly Positive: 5,838 reviews, 98 percent of them positive, for a walking sim that runs about an hour, with branching paths that reward a second pass.

The studio calls it hopecore, and for once the aesthetic label earns its keep. The announcement reel filled up with people saying the game made them cry, but the pattern in the response interests me more than any single reaction: readers keep filing it, independently, next to 17776, Jon Bois’s serialized fiction narrated by space probes watching humanity from a distance. The comparison is exactly right. Both run on the same sincerity—the conviction that the machines we fling farthest from ourselves are the most human things we have ever made. Voyager 1 is a real spacecraft carrying a real golden record, which means a game about befriending it is only half fiction to begin with.

Killscreen has a long-standing soft spot for this register. We once fell for a stop-motion Voyager made of needlework, and we have argued before that astronaut games are simple pleasures. What is new here is the economics: a free, hour-long game landing this hard suggests the walking sim may have found its natural format—short, sincere, and priced like a gift.