Space Sprouts Makes Goofing Off At Work A Grand Adventure

You’d think your first trip through space would be memorable, but in a society where spaceflight is common, maybe that’s not the case. If you want a game about piloting ships through the void of space, you have countless options to choose from. One new release focuses instead on what it might feel like to be a passenger aboard a spaceship for the very first time — assuming that voyage was on a very silly vessel full of incredibly dangerous machines.

In Space Sprouts, you play as Oda, a woman recounting her first time in space to her granddaughter. The problem is, it was so long ago, it’s hard to remember everything that happened, but by retelling the story over and over, you can uncover all those lost memories and reconstruct what actually happened on that fateful flight.

Space Sprouts is structured almost like a roguelike game, with each run being a version of the story Oda shares with her granddaughter. The first trip is short and uneventful, with barely enough time to unbuckle your seatbelt and explore the ship before it reaches its destination. But each time you uncover a unique memory, by opening locked rooms, finding interactions between objects, and having bizarre new experiences, you add a few seconds to the length of the next trip. Nothing tangible carries over from trip to trip, but by discovering shortcuts or working out new ways to use your tools, the knowledge you accrue lets you get more out of each subsequent trip.

Oda’s goal in Space Sprouts is to discover all of her memories from her first flight, but the real point of the game is just to screw around. To get anywhere in the game, you need to figure out how all the various devices and objects throughout the ship work together, and to do that, you need to just kind of go wild with them. Use a fire extinguisher in zero gravity, jump headfirst into that black hole, clone everything you can get your hands on, and suck entire rooms’ worth of debris into a vacuum cleaner. A lot of the fun of Space Sprouts is just seeing what happens when you cause enough chaos in the ship, and that’s also how you make progress.

Everything in Space Sprouts is physically simulated. Objects bounce off each other as they knock around the ship, and the ability to manipulate gravity is a huge part of your experimentation. Each room has its own gravity, generated by machines that you can tinker with or turn off entirely, and sometimes the solution to a problem is to see what happens when you approach it while floating weightlessly or walking on the ceiling. Even if you don’t get something accomplished on every flight, it can be enjoyable enough just to see how weird things can get on the ship.

For all its physics-based chaos, Space Sprouts is also a satisfying, if totally nontraditional, puzzle game. Traversing through the ship requires some clever, off-label uses of all the tools on board, and it’s even a good idea to keep a notebook handy to jot down discoveries and codes you’ve found for the built-in replicator.

Sometimes when you encounter a new mechanism or a situation you’ve never seen before, Oda’s granddaughter will chime in with a question. What was hidden behind that big door? Did you ever chuck anything out the airlock just for fun? Following these prompts will lead you to scenarios you might not have thought of otherwise, and they’re a clever way of offering subtle hints to players while still keeping up the premise that this is all just a story Oda is sharing years after it actually happened.

Standing in stark contrast to the deadly serious sci-fi games we’re used to, Space Sprouts is a utopian vision of the future filled with gags and pratfalls. Its silly sense of humor has genuinely engaging puzzles to back it up, meaning even your most chaotic experiments sometimes yield progress toward untangling the game’s looping story. Space Sprouts’ lighthearted take on space travel makes it a trip worth reliving.

Space Sprouts is available now on PC.