SPACEPLAN

SPACEPLAN is, by its own admission, a piece of interactive sci-fi based partly on a complete misunderstanding of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. You wake up on an unremarkable satellite orbiting a planet you don't recognize, with nothing to do but click and wait — and then click some more, and slowly start launching potato-based probes and devices out into the void to figure out what's around you.

The core loop is recognizably clicker — generate resources by hand or let them tick up over time, then spend them to unlock new tools and bigger missions. What sets it apart is that the math actually goes somewhere. Fifteen distinct starchy contraptions unlock as the game progresses, each one opening up a new chunk of story or a new place to send a probe, and the experience covers five different planets across two parallel realities.

It's a short game by clicker standards and deliberately so — the writing is the point. The script holds a dry, lightly absurd register throughout, the soundtrack is genuinely good, and the whole thing builds toward an ending rather than the open-ended grind most idle games drift into. The astrophysics community is yet to weigh in, but the game claims they're a fan.