This sweet life sim is Stardew meets Star Trek, and you can try the demo now

There aren't many ways left to put a twist on Stardew Valley, but suffixing it with "in space!" oughta do it. Little-Known Galaxy is out in a week, and currently has a demo on Steam, where you can sample many of the delights that you're used to from a Stardewlike when you're new in town: meeting the locals, growing potatoes, and tidying up the place. Also, raising alien pets, seeking out new life, and new civilisations... It all takes place on a spaceship, you see, and this has some ramifications to playing the game beyond reskinning everything to be shiny metal instead of picturesque mud. It's an intriguing proposition.

There is a reskin, though, and it's surprising how refreshing it is to the formula. The town is arranged on different decks of the ship, making it much easier to navigate than I had feared, and there are a couple of sweet plant aliens and characterful little robots running around. The schoolteacher is a well groomed robot named Max. A lot of people go to the plaza deck at dinner time to hang out at the restaurant, and the ship has seen a lot of captains come and go, so several crewmembers are quite curmudgeonly toward you, the new trainee captain. Generally, though, this seems to be the utopian ideal of Starfleet, with everyone getting along and doing their assigned jobs. It's sort of like if Picard got really into gardening before he retired.

But the space thing does shake up how you play. One small but impactful change is that you can't just till a convenient square of dirt outside your front door. To grow crops you need to craft a planter, and they run on power - so you also need to craft solar panels and whack them on the outside of your ship. If you don't have enough solar panels, your new planters will be useless lumps of showy metal, making Little-Known Galaxy the first Cybertrunk Owner Simulator (*snare*). This changes the whole loop of your crafting cycle! You need to gather soil samples and scrap metal as a priority, rather than the basis of your economy early on being quick-growing plants to turn a fast profit.

And yes, you visit planet surfaces (you start in orbit around a grey planet with a mysterious monolith on it) and can travel to other planets, too. There's a lot more going on with Little-Known Galaxy than I had anticipated. Have a poke around the demo yourself, and watch out for full release on May 20th.