Aground

Aground starts as a simple 2D survival crafter — you're stranded on an uninhabited island after a crash, you mine some ore, you build a shelter — and then it keeps going. The game has a goal, a story, and a reason to craft, and it gradually opens up to encompass technology trees, magic systems, vehicles, mounts, dragons, space travel, and other planets.

The early hours are the genre's familiar loop. The middle stretch expands into NPCs, quests, farming, cooking, fishing, magical research, and exploration of other islands. The late game pulls back the curtain on the larger arc: humanity has a future to fight for, returning to the stars is the only way to secure it, and even doing that might not be enough against what's out there.

Fancy Fish Games is a small indie team that has shipped twelve games since 2012, five of them commercially on Steam. Aground is their largest and most surprising project — what looks like a flat 2D mining game from the screenshots quietly contains one of the genre's stranger long-form campaigns. A 3D spin-off called Aground Zero exists in the same universe for players who want more after finishing the main game.